Kim Cheng Boey Reviews Aria by Sarah Holland-Batt

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Aria

by Sarah Holland Batt

University of Queensland Press

2008

ISBN 9780702236754

http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/index.php

Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY

Poetry is about finding the image that will suffice, that will embody the complex of emotion and thought possessing the poet’s body and soul. It is about finding concrete details that have a special resonance, and creating from a few particulars an entire mood or landscape. Sarah Holland-Batt possesses this gift in abundance. She has the attentiveness for the telling detail, and the mastery of making magic of familiar things. In poems of startling freshness and immediacy, Holland-Batt bridges the quotidian and visionary worlds in vivid acts of seeing, and reminds us of poetry’s power to renovate, to restore delight in ordinary things.

In an age where there are so many poems and poets flaunting their postmodernist opacity and reducing language to a vaguely apprehensible vaporous flow until nothing remains in the reader’s head, it is refreshing and heartening to encounter a young poet who values lyric clarity, and who, though gifted with art of seeing and turning ordinary things into arresting metaphors, does not disdain to use plain speech to say the most profound things. This gift is evident in the moving “The Sewing Room,” a tribute to the poet’s mother, its tactile touches reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s elegies for his mother:

My mother measured the margins

of my known world there:

a sunlit annex where the lines converged,

wrist to shoulder-blade, hip, ankle, waist;

maps I would only outgrow

charted in painstaking tailor’s chalk.

The image and moment are precisely delineated, and the iconic figure of the mother working her Singer wonderfully captured: “sometimes a foxtrot, sometimes a waltz,/ she treadled the pedal with a pianist’s touch.” The concluding sestet echoes the last lines in Robert Hayden’s father poem “Those Winter Sundays” (“What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”):

            What did I know of making then,

            rearranging a few sad odds and ends

under my mother’s pinned smile,

her teeth interspersed with ersatz test?

The overlocker zagged on like a lie-detector test.

I kept watch. It never leapt.

The affection, the mother-daughter bond is never stated but conveyed through the telling details, the terse sentences in the last line contrasting poignantly with the preceding aggregate of subordinate clauses, noun and preposition phrases to suggest the inadequacy of language in expressing the mother’s selfless love.

Holland-Batt reveals a Keatsian apprehension of the world around her that yields up refreshing physical details. In a few weaker poems, this silts up the movement of the lyric, but when this rich vein is balanced by a Chekhovian spareness, Holland-Batt reveals a mature mind that makes her one of the most compelling poets to emerge in recent years. This balance is most apparent in the family portraits, where the precision of detail works hand in glove with lyric cadence and restraint to create deeply poignant tributes. In “Exhaustion” the little concrete details piece together a whole life:

One afternoon I went into his silent study

and found, behind the tiny compartments

of paper-clips, rubber bands and push-pins,

an old, red tin – the relic of my grandfather’s oils,

wedged at the back of things. Horse-hair brushes,

graphite stubs, a frayed bit of string. And nestled in

the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,

a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end

folded over and over until nothing was left.

The last detail resonates endlessly in the reader’s mind, as a lasting emblem of the grandfather’s life and memory. There are other moving familial poems that echo Robert Lowell (Holland-Batt acknowledges her debt in “Letter to Robert Lowell”), but Heaney is a more palpable influence in the portraits of the father, in “Atonement” and in “The Woodpile,” which is inspired by the figure of the poet’s father splitting “rounds of wood”:

Nights were cold; my father’s breath,

blue as exhaust while he chopped, stunning each

block in two with the blade’s glottal stop

although the cold kept coming on no matter

how hard he struck.

The sensuous weave of alliterative and assonantal sounds and the use of vivid kinetic verbs are Heaneyesque, marrying memory and lyric form in a reverential gesture.

Poem after poem in the collection exhibits a Keatsian sensuality, an alert eye and ear that capture all the nuances of emotion and thought through physical detail.  “Circles and Centres” is unabashed in its use of adjectives, the long train of images breathing rapture:

You are being called. All the garden

around the house is as planets in orbit,

its slim persimmons and cumquats, their shocks

of rind, the pumpkins viridian and grooved

like distorted grenades, plump wattle in sprays

rattling its sweet dust into your eyes and nose.

Heaney is again audible in the digging motif and vivid verbs:

You are digging, digging against it,

possibly for an end; going around the perimeter

of you plot, wielding your ability to crimp

and cinch and singe like a new addition

to your vocabulary.

The poem locates a liminal instant between the outside and indoors, between the self and other. It digs deep into the moment, and while the language is beautifully evocative, it is one of the few poems where the gift for imagery runs aground on its own excess.

Holland-Batt, like Jane Hirshfield and Linda Gregg, has the ability to tune in to the mystery of ordinary things. There is a Zen-like attentiveness, and the ego disappears in a concentrated moment of seeing:

            Will you come back from the other side?

                                             No, but the world will still know me.

            And how will it know you?

                                              In the black cricket’s song.

                                              In the throat

                                              of all things burning.

There is a remarkable precision and economy of language, and a haunting acoustic, a captivating music that holds up the visual image.

Music, as theme and metaphor, permeates the work. The longer poems that with musical motifs – “Rachmaninoff’s Dream” and “Aria for a Painted Dancer” – stumble and lose clarity, the rich word-hoard cluttering up the movement, but “Misery and Pizzicato” delivers that ominous chord in Mahler’s tragic oeuvre memorably:

Morning, thinking of Mahler

in nineteenth-century Austria,

who was told Jews were not welcome

at the Vienna Opera – composer or no.

He turned Catholic, and joked.

‘I have just changed my coat,’

then went home and marked the violins

in his seventh symphony ffff, with a note:

pluck so hard that the strings hit the wood.

Again the economy and exactitude are impressive: in a short lyric Mahler’s life and work are compellingly captured.

Aria offers many poems in which the words achieve the condition of music, to quote Pater. Reading a Holland-Batt poem, one is compelled to listen to the resonance, the silence, the meaning that echoes at the end of the last line. There are a few poems of strained epiphanies, and a few others where the eye for imagery goes uncontrolled, and but overall it is a collection to keep, one to re-read for its luminous detail and knowledge, and its tender, compassionate imagination that is always “Letting the ordinary become the last.”

Ouyang Yu: To Be(long) or Not to Be(long): Issues Of Belonging In A Post-multicultural Australia

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Belonging is longing, a longing. For migrants to live in a land they have chosen to settle themselves in, to be(long) or not to be(long) is a crucial question. It depends on what they long for: Is it a temporary abode for short-term benefits before packing up and going home, a permanent enclave on its own or a (second) home where they feel they truly belong or want to be long in? This paper seeks to examine issues of belonging for first and second generation mainland Chinese migrants in a post-malticultural Australia where the idea of multiculturalism is being rendered increasingly obsolete, becoming almost ‘mal’ as in the sense of malfunctioning.[1] The discussion will be based on three books, Wang Hong’s novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), Shen Zhimin’s novel, donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) and Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan)’s photographic novel, he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You).

‘I should never have come to Australia, I should never have left my country’[2]

Wang Hong, born in Shanghai in 1962, is a Chinese woman novelist who stayed and studied in Australia from 1990 to 1992 before her return to China in 1993.[3] Apart from this, there is little biographical information on the dust jacket except a curious little note at the end of her Chinese novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), published in September 2002. The note goes, in my translation, ‘Sixth draft 2000/12/8’.[4] One can work out from this that it must have taken her seven years and six drafts to finish writing the novel; further, it must have taken her about two years to find a publisher and get the novel published, nine years after her return to China. It wouldn’t be a far-fetched conjecture that the novel bears some parallel to her own life in that the main protagonist, Ma Lan,[5] returns to China after her failed attempt to stay in Australia through a fake arranged marriage, first with an Italian, then with another man of unidentified nationality by the name of Ma Er Fu (Marf?). True to the synopsis on the back cover of the book, the novel has a ‘wonderful sense of poetry’[6] and, in my view, presents a haunting image of Chinese student lives as if caught in a time warp, a vacuum created as much by their own blind, obstinate attempts to stay as by Australia’s indifference towards their fate, and worse, by Australia’s philistine acts to make a buck by fraud through the performance of characters like Ao Lie Fo (Oliver) and his family.

jile yingwu is a painful novel to read. It traces Ma Lan’s short sojourn in Australia as grape-picker, orange-picker, lemon-picker, cleaner and hospice-carer, in places ranging from Red Cliffs on the South-Australia and Victoria border to Westfield in Sydney. In China, this university graduate ‘tried her best to learn English…in order to chuguo [out the country, meaning going overseas] one day.’ (23)[7] After she finishes her studies in Australia, she has to extend her visa but lacks the money to do it. In order to stay, she borrows money to pay Oliver to secure her a partner in a fake marriage. When this does not work, she enters into an arranged marriage with Ma Er Fu in an attempt to stay but decides to leave for China after she aborts her baby. The day she leaves, Ma Er Fu says to her:

You are right. Why must you live in this country in the southern hemisphere? There’s no reason why. I can’t see any reason. I understand you. Like you, I also suffer from homesickness….I have left my home far too long. I feel that my inner heart has lost this strength. Living is a habit. The past has been severed and so it is impossible now. I am not living. I am only surviving and hoping that one day I may live better. If I were you, I would perhaps do the same. As long as you believe that huiguo [return country or returning to your home country] makes you happy, you should huiguo.’[8]

In the extreme circumstances in which she finds herself, deep in debt from both her own family in China and the Oliver family, Ma Lan has to scrape a living by doing the hard labor as a fruit picker, getting paid 0.39 cents for 10 kilos of grapes picked (6). When she marries Ma Er Fu she has only ten dollars in her account (98). She has to rely on superstitious belief for solace. For example, when Oliver’s mother dies and is about to be shipped back to her gutu [native earth or native land], Ma Lan thinks aloud to herself:

            One person leaves Australia.

            One person enters Australia.

            The matter of the world is indestructible. This person who enters should be her! (14)

She also willfully persists in her other superstitious belief that she is somehow from the Jewish stock that is ‘distinctly different from hanren [Han people or Chinese people]’ (20) and that it is because of her ‘unresearcheable ancestry-Jewish or tujue [Turkish] merchants’ that she has ‘come ten thousand li at the end of the century to the southern hemisphere to tie the knot of marriage with someone originally from there’ (187), that someone being Ma Er Fu.

All Ma Lan ever manages to do in Australia, though, is, as she says, ‘living abjectly-for a green card’ (175), a life that is ‘finished, dead’, and she feels that if she does not sum it all up, ‘what shall arrive is only an extension of death’ (176). Here, one can’t but recall Ouyang Yu’s contemplation that ‘living in australia is living after death’.[9]

Other Chinese students fare hardly better than Ma Lan: Yang Fan does not speak English, thus rendered deaf and dumb ever since his coming to Australia (94); Lao Yan writes a letter containing his first-time payment of 100 Australian dollars that will never reach his wife in China (27), which act repeats itself to a painful degree; and Qin Yue foolishly persists in her fantasy that only by studying hard could she somehow hope to change her fate (71). Their names are ultimate symbols of irony and terror, Yang Fan meaning ‘setting sail’ and, as part of the phrase, yangfan yuanhang, implying he’s someone setting sail for a distant voyage with great hopes; Lao Yan hinting at Old Devil; and Qin Yue, Qin Moon, a woman from one of the oldest stocks of the Chinese civilization, right back to the Qin Dynasty (BC 221-207). The place names are also imbued with a sense of the macabre as the Murray River is transliterated as mai lei he (Wheat Tears River) or deliberately mis-spelt in an English poem written by Ma Lan as ‘Marry River’ (85).

Added to this is a host of other characters, most of them immigrants whose nationalities remain undisclosed, including the fraudulent Oliver family who lose two members in 10 days, giving false hope to Ma Lan and Qin Yue; Ma Er Fu whose Jewish or Turkish stock is vaguely alluded to and who wonders if he should ever have come to Australia (284); and Steven, an Australian-born Hungarian who plays the role of a Chinese in a play in which no Chinese are allowed (225), the only one who does not have a guishu gan [a sense of belonging] when he goes back to Hungary. He says, ‘when I look at them [Hungarians], I am looking at completely foreign people. Secretly, I even think people there look ugly’ (225). The interesting thing here is that Ma Lan does not identify with Steven. She ‘looks at him, without curiosity, without polite concern’ and ‘her silence bears out that his appeal is rather affected’ (225).

Throughout, there is not a single mention of words like racism or multiculturalism. Only in one scene, Liz, an Australian patient, is heard to speak sharply to Ma Lan and Xiao, a Pacific Islander. ‘ “You, you Asians get out!” The old lady tells them ferociously. “Get out of our country!” ’ (275). What follows is a quite unusual musing about happiness by Ma Lan when Liz’s son in a ‘fine’ suit asks her where she learnt her ‘good’ English:

Ma Lan’s voice sounds flat. She goes out of the room. She is weary of the way others look [at her]. Nothing will change because of the conversation. He wears a fine suit and thinks he can take pity on her because she speaks English with an English accent. She is a civilized person from an ancient, savage land. She has given all her life to learn English. However, here it is the air everyone breathes. If she had learnt something else, if she were a senior staff member in a transnational company, would her life be worth more? When she worked in a big company in guonei [inside country, meaning China] and also wore a fine suit, she didn’t feel superior to people, she didn’t feel happy.

Happiness is so rare it can only come from the inner heart (276).

Where does Ma Lan belong in Australia? One can only gauge by where she situates herself in relation to Australia. In Sydney, ‘she feels like walking on the edge of this city, this city on the edge of the ocean, the continent that this city belongs to being surrounded by the blue sea water, turning around the edge of the planet in which they were born’ (258). Australia means nothing to her. At best, it is a place for her to be ‘walking through’, ‘without leaving a trace (278)’.

Interestingly, in an unlikely place, Rose, Tom’s mother in Tony Ayres feature film, Home Song Stories (2007), has said the same thing as expressed by Ma Lan that she ‘should never have come to Australia’.[10]

san yuan se[11]: the three original colors

When Shen Jiawei, normally known as Jiawei Shen, the Australian-Chinese artist, did a portrait for John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne, he combined three major elements in the painting: John So’s Chinese face and his Aboriginal attire dealt in oils,[12] an artistic style that originated in the West, read white. Interestingly, more than a decade ago, prior to this portrait executed, in the early 1990s, when The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller was published, there is description of a harmonious relationship between Chinese, Irish and Aboriginal people, as exemplified by Noonan, Feng and Dorset, which was actually based on a goldfield painting by Joseph Johnson, featuring a Chinese, an Irishman and an Aboriginal person playing euchre that was supposedly a reflection of early harmony existing among these very different peoples before racism set in and wrought a havoc that has cast a long shadow over Australia.[13] It may sound exclusive towards people of other nationalities and ethnicities but this concern with the three original colours has been an age-old one with people from as diverse backgrounds as Scottish (Hume Nisbet), Hungarian (David Martin) and white Australian (Xavier Herbert), to whom Chinese play a linking role between the black and the white.[14] In donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) by Shen Zhimin, the combination of the three original colours forms the basis of the novel, in which an Aboriginal boy, a Chinese boy and a white Australian boy go hand in hand in search of Australia’s Aboriginal origin, symbolized by the shangxin zhi di (heart-broken place or heart-breaking place) where a massacre had taken place 200 years ago involving many Aboriginal deaths (227), and, in the process, discover themselves. It is a much happier novel than the ironically titled, Extremely Happy Parrots, in that the three boys choose to live an outcast’s life by roaming the country, casting their sense of belonging to the four winds.

The stories of these three boys roaming the country in search of treasure, spiritual and otherwise, are less important than the idea that lies behind the construction of the novel. This idea reflects a significant realization, albeit limited, on the part of the author that the key to racial and cultural harmony in Australia is a blending of the three primary colours and it is based on this realization that Shen assigns roles for the three boys to play. What is more intriguing is the fact that two of the boys come from disreputable family backgrounds, tang mu si (Thomas), illegitimate son of a conservative MP who commits suicide after his affair is exposed and Gao Qiang [meaning High Strong], son of a corrupt Chinese company director. When these family tragedies occur, Thomas and Gao Qiang become homeless, straying into Redfern where they befriend tu gu [meaning Earth Valley], the Aboriginal boy, and fight together against the police in the Redfern Riots.[15] It is obvious that an echo to Australia’s convict past is implied in the family background of Thomas and Gao Qiang in that both have come from a disgraced family background and a defiance of Australian police, symbol of state control and power, is shown through their fight in the riots. Despite rather stereotypical portraits of the three boys, e.g., Tu Gu as someone who does not care about money (89) and who identifies strongly with the wandering spirit of an eternal traveler ge lan te (Grant) (125), Gao Qiang as someone overwhelmingly concerned with money (89, 129) and Thomas as someone ‘the most brainy’, full of intelligent ideas (135), the novel nevertheless reveals a darker truth about Australia as a place not fit for Chinese to stay. After all their adventures involving fights against a rascal si di mu (Steam), their musical band going places and their search for gold, etc, Gao Qiang ‘is going back to China’ (318). The novel ends with Gao Qiang saying, in response to the questions from Tu Gu and Thomas as to why he is going back, ‘You forgot. Didn’t I say that I was going to run a trading company and come to Australia to do business? When I make money and make a fortune, I shall invite you to have fun in China.’ (318)

It is worth noting that, by comparison with Wang Hong, Shen’s message is upbeat about his three fictional boys, as reflected in a remark made by Grant, an erstwhile bank manager who gives up on his work in favour of traveling alone, having been traveling on the road for 25 years, without family or kids. He says that after he gets on the road, he ‘thinks of wanting to go home less and less’ (125), that it’s only on the road that he ‘feels whole’ (127) and that, for him, ‘there is always a home by the side of roads’ (128). What I can recall from this is the story James Chang (Zhang Zhizhang), a Taiwanese-Chinese writer, told in the 1994 Chinese-Australian Arts Festival of an old overseas Chinese who said that the minute he sat down in his seat on a plane he felt at home and that’s where he belonged.

There is an early echo to Dynamic Treasure Trove in Shen Zhimin’s novella, titled, bian se hu (The Colour Changing Lake), which I published in Otherland (No. 2, 1996) as editor. In that story about the difficulties Chinese students have when they first arrive in Australia, it is Aborigines who befriend them, not white Australians. In fact, white Australians are terrible racists. When Jiang Hua, the name meaning River Flower or River Chinese, the protagonist, is playing erhu in a small town, a ‘tall white woman’ rushes in and tells him off, ‘like yelling at an animal’;[16] she calls Jiang ‘a beggar from the East and a heathen’.[17] Jiang has to leave even though he thinks that ‘their behaviour does not correspond to God’s spirit.’[18] When Jiang Hua is detained by the Immigration officers, it is niao (Bird), an Aboriginal elder who comes to his aid with his men and gives the officers and policemen a talking-to, ‘We have been living here for hundreds of years thousands of years tens of thousands of years. We are really master of this land. We should decide who is or is not an illegal immigrant. This Chinese is my friend. He can stay as long as he likes. It’s got nothing to do with you. If you don’t like it, you can go back to Sydney or elsewhere. Or you can go back to your old home in Europe.’[19]

In Shen Zhimin’s novella, there is almost a visible determination not to give whites their due but to insist on a healthy dose of ethnic mixture. None of his heroes or heroines are white Australians. Born of an English dandy father and a Gipsy mother, Weiduoliya (Victoria) is a street artist who becomes Jiang’s friend. Bird, the Aboriginal elder, is of Aboriginal and Chinese parentage because his grandfather was a Chinese gold-digger who escaped from ‘white persecution’ to live with Aborigines and married an Aboriginal woman, Bird’s grand-mother.[20] Even the two Immigration officers bent on taking Jiang prisoner turn out to be migrants themselves, one a Jew from England whose father had escaped there from Poland in the Second World War and the other is originally also an illegal immigrant from Yugoslavia.[21] It is these ideological underpinnings that made Shen’s novel and novella read more like political fables than truly realized fiction.

Possibly related to Australia[22]

he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You) is not an Australian novel; it is written by a hyphenated Australian. Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan) has indeed lived for many years in Australia since 1990 but, after he became an Australian citizen, he decided to return to Shanghai in or about 2000, coming back once every year, according to him, to lodge his annual tax return. In this roaming novel, interspersed with photographs, from Madrid through Saville, Bacelona, Napoli, Sicily, Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva, Paris, Avignon and London, enacted entirely between ni (you) and wo (I), through a series of email letters or interior monologues, Australia is virtuely non-existent. The only Australian is a girl by the name of da fu ni (Daphne) that ‘I’ met in a Shanghai-based art exhibition (61), who grew up in a Melbourne beach town and is a girl of ‘innocent and natural Australian qualities’ (66). When they meet in Barcelona, Daphne asks ‘I’, ‘You go out alone this far. Do you want to escape? How far do you want to go?’ (66). ‘I’, who does not have a name, says in a philosophical remark that sounds like Grant in donggan baozang, ‘Travel seems to give me more opportunities to catch things that almost drift past my body’ (67).

A novel of lacuna in which Australia does not exist, by a Chinese-Australian who now prefers to make his home in Shanghai, ‘the most Westernised city in China’ (19), is perhaps more telling than otherwise, more Australian than un-Australian, or should I say, more Australian in being un-Australian. What is not expressed in the fiction finds expression in the non-fiction, in the houji (Postscript), in which Zhao Chuan describes why he wrote the book. ‘The reason why I had that desire to write is probably related to my having lived for many years in Australia. It is a migrant society where people from different cities and different cultural experiences have to live together. We are curious about each other; our mutual interaction is ongoing but is never somehow fitting. We live closely together: working in the same place, separated by buildings or walls or we scrape our shoulders as we walk past or are even sleeping in the same bed. However, our memories are probably far apart, hard to be pulled together (230).’

More than Leslie Zhao’s novel, Hongchen jie (Doomed to Red Dust), a recent novel by Ying Ge, based in Australia since 1989, completely abandons Australia in its narration, featuring instead a Chinese-American in Lin Wenlu, who gives up his well-paying job in an American company and chooses to stay in Beijing.[23] It is not hard to find that this homeward bound attachment has already been foreshadowed in his first novel, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean), in which an old Chinese man muses on the significance of overseas Chinese in these words:

Wherever I go, I remain a Chinese in other people’s eyes. Chinese are a heavy nation. (339-340)…But, I think, whatever circumstances in which they find themselves, Chinese people have a thought that co-exists with their hearts. That is: I am born on yellow earth, I am a Chinese, I should do something for my zuguo (ancestral nation or motherland) and I should do something for my nation….(341)[24]

This is of course didactic but didactic in a way that makes sense. If multiculturalism is meant to keep peoples apart, so that ‘one cannot possibly dance the Russian ballet to the accompaniment of Aboriginal instruments nor can Western ways of singing match Asian folk tunes’,[25] they cannot but keep harking back to their zuguo (ancestral nation) as their only way out, as Ying Ge says on the back of his first novel, ‘However far they go, they remain sons and grandsons of Yellow Emperor, born on Yellow Earth.’[26]

If there is any home to belong to, it is perhaps in the fiction that Zhao Chuan creates, one that is ‘ready to get lost, to encounter strange crowds and to turn into another direction after an exchange of a few words’. (231)

The most poignant remark is made in a recent editorial in huaxia zhoubao (The Weekly Chinese) newspaper, in Melbourne, in celebration of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (25/9/07) when the editor says, after describing Australia as a ‘migrant country’ full of peoples from all over the world, ‘You’d be dead wrong if you think this country is like China where there are “fifty six nationalities, fifty six constellations, fifty six flowers and fifty six brothers and sisters that all belong in one family”. Respecting each other like guests is all superficiality, formality, politeness, distance, strangeness and non-intimacy; it is hard to mix like oil and water.”[27]

Michelle Cahill Reviews The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness Ghosts From Elsewhere by Tabish Khair

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

Alex Kuo: Creative Writing Programs: An Essay

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. 

Cameron Lowe Reviews The Best Australian Poems 2009

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.

Margaret Bradstock Reviews Possession by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

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 21^st 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