Lesley Lebkowicz reviews While I am drawing breath by Rose Ausländer (trans)

October 6, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

While I am drawing breath

By Rose Ausländer,

translated by Anthony Vivis and Jean Boase-Beier

ISBN 978 1906570 30 9

Arc Publications

Reviewed by LESLEY LEBKOWICZ

Black milk: the poetry of Rose Ausländer

Many poetry readers, asked about the poetry of the Holocaust, will think of Paul Celan’s Todesfuge and its powerful opening image:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink . . .

Fewer readers will know that the image of black milk is from an early poem by Rose Ausländer. She was Celan’s senior by some 19 years. They both lived in the predominantly Jewish town of Czernowicz (now Cernauti) and became friends.  She was something of a mentor to him. When he used her profoundly paradoxical image of black milk, she generously said he was the greater poet and that she was happy he had used her image.

Celan’s suffering after the Holocaust was great: he committed suicide by throwing himself in the Seine in 1946. Ausländer, however, went on, and went on writing. She was prolific, with 24 books to her name, two published after her death in 1988. Writing was fundamental to her survival, and though she had already begun to write and publish before the Holocaust, her writing, her poetry, was the breath which sustained her life through and after the many dislocations and losses the Holocaust imposed on her.

Ausländer was born Rose Scherzer; her husband’s name was Ausländer. The name means ‘foreigner’; literally, someone from another country. Their marriage didn’t last. Ausländer’s use of the name did. It fitted her life, her frequent re-locations; it suited the way she felt about these dislocations. The subject of her work, most often spoken of indirectly, largely through imagery, is the Holocaust and the way it shaped her life. One of her recurrent images is of ash:

In the rain of ashes
is the trace of your name

It was
a perfect word

Fire
consumed it
‘Ashes’ (91)

Ash and language are again conjoined in ‘Your House’:

Ash
choking on the words
(73)

And so powerfully in ‘Ark’:

On the sea
waits
an ark
of stars

for the
ashes
that survive
the flood of fire
(89)

In one respect ash is the literal outcome of the cremation of the bodies of the camp prisoners. The literal embodies the metaphor of the worthless residue of precious people destroyed. Ausländer rarely speaks of individual people; her voice is not explicit about the personal or even about the historical.

Hard truths are hard to speak; and hard to avoid: they seep into, and colour experience and writing which alludes to the experiences. Ausländer shares this impulse with W.G. Sebald whose prose was deeply informed by the same Gargantuan and subterranean subject.

Instead of the personal and the historical, Ausländer speaks in the language of fundamental elements: snow, fire, house, air, water, so that while her writing is born of historical specifics, it transcends those conditions and speaks to the elements which underlie the horrible capacity of humans to destroy each other.

In Your House:
The sun says
sleep yourself awake
my child
I will light your way
home

The rain
I am weeping for the
children . . .
(73)

And ‘Shut Out Their Love’ is almost entirely made up of elemental imagery:

They came
with guns and jagged banners
shot down the moon and all the stars
and shut out their light
and shut out their love

That day we buried the sun
And there was eternal night
(83)

Ausländer rarely capitalises anything other than the initial letter of a stanza. The additional capitalisation of the ‘And’ beginning the last line heralds the significance of the final statement.

Ausländer’s preference for working in these univeral elements means that not only does she transcend the specifics of history, she also transcends (or bypasses?) the specifics of individuality, of personality. While the piles of shoes or clothing displayed in Holocaust museums and memorials inevitably carry the imprint of the person who once owned and wore them, she does not give us this.

What she gives us instead is the power of language as a way of surviving what is too harsh to be specified, to be spoken of. Again and again she refers to language. Language has the power to give life; in Hunger:

Secretively I plant
the word in this cell
exhorting the apple to grow. . .
(63)

In a poem the title of which is translated as Words (though it is Sprache in German, which means Language), she begins:

Keep me in your service
my whole life long
let me breathe in you

I thirst for you
drink you word for word
my source
(23)

Even when Ausländer writes of despair, it is expressed through an image about language. From ‘The Net’:

I want to say something
one word
which says it all

not
I am who I am

/ . . ./

The word
fails me now
My words
fall silent in me
(23)

That Ausländer goes on to write of the failure of language is of course paradoxical. While I am Drawing Breath is seeded with paradox.

Dust that joins is a series of paradoxical images which Ausländer piles one on the other to both create and annihilate the universe she inhabits:

We
weavers of words

heretics who believe
we fly to the stars
in love
with the earth
which we burn to ashes
in cleansing fire
(21)

Paradox is the stuff of much spiritual discourse. To take logically opposed notions and unite them is to defy reason and drive the conscious mind beyond reason’s limitations into a spiritual reality. This is how Ausländer’s poetics works. The reality of the war, its racism and violence, drives us either to insanity or to spiritual reality. Paradox allows Ausländer to speak the unspeakable.

*

While I am Drawing Breath was published in 2014, a republication from 1995 of the collection then named Mother Tongue. The translation, by Jean Boase-Beier and Anthony Vivis, is presented as a parallel text: German on the left, English facing on the right-hand page. There is an integrity, an honouring of the text and the reader, in publishing a parallel text. While I respect this integrity, it sometimes made my reading a vexed thing.

I came to this review by virtue of my experience as a poet and reviewer, not as a native German speaker, nor with any academic qualifications in German language and literature. But my parents were native German speakers and I heard the language and learnt its cadences as a child. Some years ago I worked on the translation of an early Buddhist verse cycle with two Pali scholars, Pali being the language of the verse cycle. In the course of this I learned about the three-fold pattern of translation where a teams of translators collaborate: one fluent only in the first language, one bilingual and the third fluent only in the language of the translation, a system which makes both for accuracy and ease in the final version.

This fluency and fidelity is not always present in the book under review. For example, ‘verbrannte Kinder’ in Your House is translated as ‘children who played in the fire’. ‘Verbrannte’ means ‘burnt, burnt up, incinerated’. There’s no playing in Ausländer’s text. Some of these deviations from Ausländer’s uncompromising voice might better have been described as being ‘after Ausländer’. Though these glitches are unfortunate, it’s good that Ausländer’s poetry is available in English. The brilliance of her writing documents the possibility of transcending the worst of which we are capable.

LESLEY LEBKOWICZ lives in Canberra on Ngunnawal land. She has published five books, including the award-winning The Petrov Poems (Pitt Street Poetry, 2013), a collaborative translation of Book IV of the Sutta Nipata (the oldest Buddhist verse cycle) and most recently, Mountain Lion (Pitt Street Poetry, 2019).

Amy Walters reviews The Everlasting Sunday by Robert Lukins

October 5, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Everlasting Sunday

by Robert Lukins

ISBN

UQP

Reviewed by AMY WALTERS

Robert Lukins’ debut novel follows seventeen-year-old Radford as he commences at Goodwin Manor, “a place for boys who had been found by trouble” (19). The Manor is a dilapidated institution of reform in the Shropshire countryside, which the Queensland-raised Lukins has said was inspired by an old house he encountered while working as a postman in Shropshire. In the tradition of the British boarding school, the students are referred to by surname. To call it a school, however, is a bit of a stretch; as the narrator notes with characteristic obliqueness: “There was no schooling, but things like lessons” (42). The Manor is overseen by Teddy, whose good intentions are undercut by his tendency towards depression and alcoholism. While Government inspectors nose around from time to time, this intrusion of authority only serves to highlight the boys’ marginalised position relative to society at large. 

This sense of isolation is heightened due to the novel’s backdrop of the Big Freeze: the winter of 1962-63, when snow started falling on Boxing Day and continued for ten weeks. In her recent book Frostquake, Juliet Nicolson argued that during this period Britain underwent “a process of incubation” whereby “society was preparing for the moment when a different landscape would emerge. This was a winter in which despair and hardship both personal and political contrasted with a burgeoning sense of liberation and opportunity. It was a winter in which the structural pillars of class and entitlement … were starting to fragment and crumble.” (#)

The tension in the novel largely derives from this sense of liminality: as the outside world re-emerges, will the boys be rehabilitated, or will they enter adulthood in their current state of iniquity? If the atmosphere is anything to go by, the odds do seem stacked against them. Inanimate objects are imbued with a menacing quality: the piano delivers “a clap of untuned thunder” (26) and, as Radford is driven to the Manor by his uncle, he sees the city “effecting a cowardly retreat” (3) through the car’s rear window. Snuffy, a former Goodwin resident who returns for a visit after being released from prison, is a sad portent of a life that may be to come. Winter, similarly, is a character, and the boys its plaything: “From high above, where fates were decided, these boys appeared as helpless as they truly were. Winter’s show was so great and rare it too could only wonder at what it was getting away with. These lonely humans here, these children, were like currants to be pressed into the cake’s surface.” (53)

For a novel set on the cusp of the counter-culture revolution, the prose style is reminiscent of a nineteenth century novel. Granted, the newsreaders still wore suits to read the news in 1962, but some of Lukins’ narration is more suited to a Victorian novel than one set just over half a century ago. Ian McEwan’s 2007 novella On Chesil Beach was set in the summer of 1962, just before the Big Freeze, and manages to capture the sense of a bygone era without resorting to florid description. “This was still the era,” McEwan writes, “… when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” (6) There is a sense in which the two protagonists, Florence and Edward, are sandwiched between those who fought in the war, and a more liberated generation to come. Florence gleans worrying details of what she can expect on her wedding night from a “modern, forward-looking handbook” (7) while Edward feels obliged to accept a job in her father’s business. As they receive their dinner in their hotel room, they are conscious of the old men downstairs who are “filling their pipes for one last time that day” and waiting for the main bulletin on the wireless, “a wartime habit they would never break.” (24) 

Whereas McEwan’s prose is crisp and sophisticated, The Everlasting Sunday is full of convoluted passages, which often read as overwrought and artificial. This passage is indicative of some of the contortions Lukins devises:

“… Radford tried to remember the last time his hand had been held. Now the man added a second palm to the act such that he held both of Radford’s. Having completed this ligature he resumed motionlessness.” (12)

It becomes apparent, however, that Lukins is genuinely taking his cue from Victorian literature. Upon arriving at Goodwin Manor, Radford muses to himself that the place is “[a]ll too Tom Brown and the neat perils of boarding school. Perhaps Foster would play the thick-necked bully and there would be a dastardly teacher to make unstuck. All too cute.” (34) This is a reference to Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes which gave a semi-autobiographical account of life at Rugby Public School, and spawned an entire genre of fiction for boarding boys. Unlike Rugby, Goodwin Manor is not a bastion of privilege, but it fulfils a similar function to the public school: the making or breaking of adolescent boys. Although on the surface they are capable of scraping along together in relative peace, sharing beer, cigarettes and unauthorised visits to a nearby cemetery, the threat of violence is never far away. Radford is instantly attuned to the taught atmosphere of his new home, making a “commitment [to] expose nothing of himself to this house.” Dilapidated and foreboding, Goodwin Manor is also a nod to the Gothic, with the plot haunted mainly by the mystery of Radford’s crime, which is cleverly revealed in the final pages. 

The Everlasting Sunday is a layered and complex debut. While at times the floridity of the prose can be an impediment, reading the novel with the Gothic in mind helps to put its melodramatic overtones in context. The subject matter, already curiously old-fashioned, is oddly devoid of contemporary resonance, but Lukins’ sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of the plight of vulnerable boys against whom the odds have always been stacked transcends its archaic posturing. Though the thaw comes for the nation, the reader suspects Radford’s emotional life may always be frozen.

Cited

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Oxford University Press, 1989 [1857].
Ian McEwan, 2008, On Chesil Beach, Vintage, London.
Juliet Nicolson, Frostquake. Vintage Publishing, 2021. 

Dženana Vucic reviews Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt by Elena Gomez

September 15, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt

by Elena Gomez

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN 9781925780741

Reviewed by Dženana Vucic
 
 
To read Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (2020), Elena Gomez’s second full-length poetry collection, is to be propelled headlong through the dizzy intersect of postmodernity and Marxist-feminist critique, to be flooded with possibilities for distraction, and for engagement. It is a work that not only demands rereading but requires it. Which is not to say that it cannot be drunk down along with your breakfast coffee (it’s slim enough that this is possible), but it is to say that the work is best enjoyed over a series of re-readings, with time for the ideas to settle into your insides, digest. 

In the first instance, one can let the references wash over them, become background to the compulsion forward and through. The writing is pacey, and the direct, sometimes conversational tone—so removed from the intellectual posturing that marks much academia-adjacent work—allows readers to slip easily into the pages without getting hung up on their theoretical or historical underpinnings. The critique is there, underscoring everything, but the first reading can be one of pure pleasure. Slowing down, or (as in my case) re-reading, leads to uncovering. 

Gomez peppers her work with references to revolution, to Marxist-feminist theory, to pop culture and to our contemporary and each reading unfolds possibilities, invites further study and collaboration in meaning making. Names and dates appear with little preamble or explanation and re-readings lead to google searches and rabbit-hole Wikipedia binges, the collection sitting at the centre of a web of connections from which the reader is pushed to questioning what it means to exist in postmodernity. Objects, in particular, are everywhere in the work, cast into affective relation to one another, to world structures and to readers. There are batteries, bobby pins, snap back caps, calico rugs, silk scarfs, black patterned shawls, bloodstained bedsheets, mulberry lipstick, cowskin purses, pools, headphones, babydoll dresses (Courtney Love’s, in peach), ungainly frocks, pianos, lavender mist pillows, and more. The excesses of capitalism fill the pages, are turned and refracted across vectors of desire, need and obligation. For example, of a ‘ribbed cream short sleeve maxi’, Gomez writes: 

Her judgement takes into account the labour involved
in anger vs the labour involved in disappointment.
She is to be worn by someone who withstands rotating
modules for productivity

Readers are gently oriented through Gomez’ experiences as a cis Woman of Colour and arts worker, and through this prism Gomez explores legacies and realities of labour, care, gender and bodies under neoliberal capitalism. The collection is a snapshot in time, but one which is careful to capture the generational nature of the project—the past and the present are in intimate communication, inextricable in a Marxist-feminist poetics that captures the Russian Revolution, the early Soviet era, the mid-to-late-20th century and our post-GFC moment. 

The collection is at once an epic poem and a series of poems, each page offering both a discrete moment and a continuous slippage into past and future. This is evident from the first page where Gomez seems to draw the poem to a close only to throw it wide open again upon the turn:

          ready 2 enable

like how you enable
me to be

demanding of pleasure

Gomez’ writing makes clear that history is open-ended and incomplete, ongoing. So too is the revolution. 

The future is evoked too, through Gomez attention to intertextual clues and the paths she is sending readers on, and in her use of frequent rhetorical questions, calling the reader to attention: ‘Am I too far inwards? Is this a way to conduct a mob?’; ‘What does aesthetics even do these days’; ‘What kinds of poetry are you making? Why is this so hard to contemplate?’; ‘Could you shout more or are we sufficient’. 

Alexandra Kollontai, revolutionary, politician, Marxist theorist and writer, is a central and recurring figure, one who allows Gomez to explore the gendered nature of precarious and unwaged labour, particularly in literary and/or artistic communities. Gomez calls to her, an apostrophic address that, through its invocation of one who cannot respond, implicates the reader in the search for answers: 

dear Alexandra please where are the new women were the
old women somewhere is the un-born woman anywhere or
does work also abolish the rest

…

dear Alexandra how many lovers does it take to bring
down an empire

Kollontai, an oft-forgotten figure who experienced something of a revival in the seventies, was especially interested in parsing love, desire, gender and family under communism, weaving her lived experience with her theories of communist futures and often using literature to elaborate her ideas (for example in her novel Red Love (1927)). Her interests have been taken up by Gomez and reframed through our contemporary, and through poetry. 

There’s a delicious irony in critiquing capitalism through poetry, a form which has little to offer in terms of ‘market value’ and a form which traditionally skews away from the type of ‘rationality’ underscoring capitalism as an economic system. Despite its low ‘profit margins’ and understanding the privilege inherent in having time to write, poetry allows a certain freedom to make this critique since poets know very well that they are mostly exempt from the limitations imposed by market pressures. Gomez nods to this, writing: 

There is a question surrounding us i.e. how may poems
will recuperate the surplus value produced by a worker
who must read in order to produce the company’s
commodity

There is a curious balance, too, between surreal elements (I climbed away/ A mountain goat/ found me weeping / and I refused its offer’) and riffs on the language of work-place (A keyboard shortcut; you could’ve said something. / I watched for a bit before we packed up the office./ Whatever else was going on/ You were still supreme at note-taking / When pamphlet distribution was at an all-time low’). At moments these disparate threads meet:

After a boss leaked the surplus
labour all over your standing desk

we divided the chips from my
snack pockets. I was too girly

and it showed.

All through the collection, Gomez nods to the un/reality of our situation and to that which distracts us from this, in particular to objects and pop culture, offering us possibilities for reframing. For example, drawing on Kim Stanley’s utopian Mars trilogy she writes: ‘I am meant to be thinking about revolution RIGHT NOW/ but all I can think of is outer space.’ This, I think, neatly summarises the focus of the collection: the way that we are distracted (by neoliberalism, by the realities of waged and unwaged labour, by our many objects, and indeed, by love and desire) from our revolutionary goals and how we can reframe those distractions for revolutionary ends. 

 
Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet and critic. She has received the 2021 Kat Muscat Fellowship and a 2020-21 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship to work on an autotheoretical book about her experience as a refugee, the Bosnian war, identity, memory and un/belonging. Her writing has appeared in Cordite, Overland, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Australian Poetry Journal, the Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Rabbit, and others. She tweets at @dzenanabanana.

Joshua Bird reviews British India, White Australia by Kama Maclean

September 12, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

British India, White Australia

by Kama Maclean

ISBN 9781742236216

New South Books

Reviewed by JOSHUA BIRD

Perhaps one of the most under-appreciated elements of systems of racial discrimination is their sheer banality. 

Whether it be the efficient genocidal bureaucracy of the Nazi holocaust or the complex racist laws and policies that held together the system of Apartheid in South Africa, their existence reminds us that racism and prejudice are not just the remit of bad people—‘racists’—doing ‘racist’ things. Rather, racism is a concept that explains—indeed generates—entire systems of oppression and exclusion. Such systems are administered soberly and dutifully by governments and their representatives often in pursuit of their own perception of the common good.

For a real-world example of countries whose histories are informed by the administration of racism you could not find two clearer cases in India and Australia. Both countries are connected by a shared experience of colonialism of the British variety yet they participated on quite different ends of the imperial spectrum. The central explanation of that difference is, of course, race. Australia was not only a part of an empire constructed with Whiteness at its core, it was a nation who had only just recently declared most proudly its intention to be the purest, whitest nation in the British Empire. India, on the other hand, was a proud ancient civilisation now denied equal standing within the Empire, despite representing its largest source of resources and income, solely on the basis of its non-White status.

Using race and colonialism as a common thread, British India, White Australia, by Kama Maclean, attempts to explore this complex set of inter-relationships between Australia, India and Britain (as both nations and peoples) from Australian Federation in 1901 until India’s independence in 1947. In the first half of the twentieth century, British propaganda efforts went to great pains to emphasise the kinship of the Imperial relationship. This narrative was particularly emphasised during World War II when the survival of the Empire itself rested very heavily on India’s contribution to the war effort. Yes, despite this narrative of brotherhood, it would be some time before Australia even approached recognising India as a sovereign nation.

Historically, Australian perspectives on India were mediated through the triangulated prism of Britain – and the British Empire. For example, while Australian trade to India was robust, such trade was transacted largely with British colonial enterprises and seen as a component of global Imperial Trade rather than a bilateral economic relationship with India itself. India’s economy was shackled to Britain’s as a prime source of raw materials for British industry and a captive market for British manufactured goods. As Maclean notes, “India was more imagined than experienced in Australia, with the vast majority of transnational connections heavily mediated through the white mechanisms of the British Raj” (Maclean, p55). This was not an accident. Rather, it was by British design and intent. 

From India’s perspective, the ties of Empire served to increase tensions with Australia rather than bind them closer. Australia’s stridently racist immigration policies—which treated British Indians just as unfairly as Chinese or other non-whites—put it at odds with a country looking to assert itself on equal footing within the Empire. Australia, for its part, tended to see Indian criticism of its restrictive policies as indicative of the Indian people’s ‘hyper-sensitive’ nature (Maclean, p233), rather than a genuine grievance borne of justifiable concern. In international forums Australian diplomats did their best to frame the country’s policies of prejudicial exclusion in economic terms rather than explicitly race-based ones. Australia’s concern was with non-whites’ willingness to work for low wages without union membership, it was argued, rather than any sense of racial superiority or prejudice that motivated Australia’s actions. Those paying attention will recognise similarities to contemporary Australian political discourses around migration (for both refugees and non-refugee).

Arguably, for much of the 20th century content to follow Britain’s lead, Australia was most active internationally when combating attempts to progress racial equality. For the antipodean colony, the issues of challenging apartheid, softening the White Australia policy and Indian home rule were all connected—each an equally slippery slope which must be defended against at all costs lest the Empire come undone. Most famously, the advocacy of Australian Prime Minister Hughes was instrumental in halting a resolution in favour of a racial equality clause during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Maclean covers negotiations of this kind in great detail in the book, although the casual reader may find the content covering various international agreements and domestic legislation a dense read.

However, British India, White Australia is as much about British hypocrisy on the issue of race as it is about Australia’s own discriminatory policies in relation to Indians. While Britain often joined India in showing dismay over Australia’s policies, this was only because of their perceived impact on the stability of the Empire rather than any higher moral argument. Indeed, Maclean argues that Australia’s race-based immigration regime was entirely consistent with the Empire’s principles and values rather than an aberration from them. 

Race and inherent white superiority were used to justify Britain’s refusal to extend self-rule to India just as much as they were used to justify the exclusion of non-whites from Australia. As Australia’s third Prime Minister Chris Watson argued: 

“The British Government do not think of putting the Hindoo (sic) or any other native of India upon the same plane as the people of the United Kingdom. The ground I take is that the natives of India are British subjects and subjects only, whilst the people of the United Kingdom are citizens as well, and British subjects in Australia are citizens also. That constitutes a wide distinction” (Maclean, pp25-26)

The sensitives of relations within the Empire meant that the reasoning for this distinction was seldom explicitly stated—the racist assumption that Indians were not capable of self-rule (at least not currently). Similarly, Australia’s selective application of a theoretically colour-blind language test allowed the country to effectively bar the migration of non-Whites without stating their true intent.

Ironically, Australians themselves balked at Britain’s use of bureaucracy to discriminate against them in the form of access to roles in the Indian Civil Service (ICS). At the time, Britain required applicants for work in the Indian colonial administration to attend examinations that were held in London, thus limiting access to only those Australians with the time and funds to allow for the trip to Britain. Australian lobbying for the holding of examinations locally were resisted by Britain at least partially on the grounds that giving in to such a request would increase pressure on them to hold similar examinations in India itself—thus opening the door for increased numbers of Indians working in the ICS. As with Australia’s language test, Britain felt the need to maintain a veneer of procedural fairness in enacting its racial discrimination. As Maclean notes, “discrimination was effectively concealed in the garb of the efficient and procedural bureaucracy of the examination” (Maclean, p41).

While the low numbers of Indians migrating to Australia in the early Twentieth Century meant that they were never a target of specific legislation or policies to curb their numbers or influence, they nonetheless suffered at the hands of Australia’s racist policies which aimed to discriminate against all non-Whites equally. Indeed, it was this failure to give British Indians the proper standing expected of fellow members of the Empire that was the greatest source of grievance for Indians in Australia.

Those Indians resident in Australia balked at their second-class standing and were very active in petitioning governments—both domestically and internationally—for a recognition of their special status. Having spilled blood for the Empire in the recent war, surely they had done enough to prove themselves loyal subjects and worthy of respect? ‘No’, was Australia’s response. If anything, Indian migration to Australia represented a new threat to the Australian worker and fed into the long-running inferiority complex of the Colonial Australian. The expansion of Western models of education to the Indian middle classes, including English language training, had created a generation of Indians who could not only compete with Australian workers but exceed them in capacity and skills. 

Despite these tensions, there was engagement and contact between Indians living in Australia and local people. However, given the scarcity of first-person Indian accounts, Maclean is generally forced to adopt the perspective of non-Indian Australians in painting a picture of the lives of Indians in Australia at the time. This includes a fascinating analysis of the presence of Indian hawkers through the family photos and remembrances of those rural Australian families with whom they traded. For many of these isolated families, particularly women, the arrival of a travelling Indian hawker represented an opportunity to sample new wares, share local gossip and access the world beyond the farm. However, such representations are just snippets; distant and casual.

While Maclean herself acknowledges the limitations of first-person sources, the book would have benefited from more illustration of the internal life of Indians resident in Australia at the time. How did they reconcile their identities as Indians, Australians and British subjects? Instead, the greater availability of official documentation over personal accounts means that much of the book is concerned with the formal administrative aspects of Indian identity in Australia in the early twentieth century—such as the advocacy for equal legal and/or residential status. 

In the end, Australia’s reticence in engaging directly with India and Indians gave way to shifting political realities. Even by the 1920s, Britain’s primary role in mediating the Australia-India relationship had started to recede. This allowed for both parties to establish more direct engagement for the first time. Oftentimes this engagement was led by niche organisations; Communists, Theosophists and Friendship societies. The Australian public’s impact on India’s independence movement was minimal at best. Despite this, the book explores the activities and internal machinations of a number of these well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual efforts. 

With Britain’s retreat from Asia during World War II and India’s newly won independence, Australian policy-makers quickly acknowledged the need for a recalibration of its diplomatic priorities. As European powers retreated from their former colonial territories in the region Australia was now looking at a more isolated future. Cultivation of stronger diplomatic ties with India was needed as Australia pivoted to face a new foe—global Communism. Soon both countries would establish respective diplomatic representation, opening channels for direct political communication without British involvement. This would eventually be followed by the first cracks in the White Australia policy, allowing Indians to study, work and migrate to Australia. 

In recent years, political necessity sparked by shifts in international power relations has once again seen Australian political leaders turn their attention to India. This time, however, it is China to whom the West seeks India’s help in balancing. India has become one of Australia’s key strategic partners in responding to the growing economic and military might of China, joining the United States and Japan as members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘the Quad’). On the economic front, Australia’s two-way goods and services trade with India now totals a massive $24.4 billion per year, and has become a key market for Australian exporters looking to avoid an over-reliance on China. At the individual level, engagement has never been higher. India is now the second largest country of origin for overseas-born Australian residents, and last year well over 100,000 Indians studied in Australia. Exchange goes both ways, as Australian cricketers ply their wares throughout the Indian Premier League and Indian cuisine and culture now firmly within the mainstream. 

And yet, the central question raised by British India, White Australia remains. Do Australia and India truly share a set of common values and understandings? The poor treatment of Indian-Australians trying to return to Australia during the recent surge of Covid-19’s Delta variant revealed fractures in the relationship. Racist incidents, such as the apparent targeting of Indian taxi drivers in Melbourne, have also undermined any argument that racist attitudes towards Indians are now in the country’s rear-view mirror. While some may suggest that any hope for long-term engagement between India and Australia rests on an embrace of their common history, others like Maclean will continue to assert that in fact it is this shared colonial experience that has prevented the relationship from evolving beyond its racist origins.

JOSHUA BIRD is a community development specialist and scholar who focuses on minority rights and multicultural policy.  He has spent the last twenty years living and working across the Asia-Pacific and has a Masters of Asia-Pacific Studies (2010) and a Doctor of Philosophy in China Studies (2016). Joshua is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books and Cha Asian Literary Journal, and his first book Economic Development in China’s Northwest: Entrepreneurship and Identity Along China’s Multi-ethnic Borderland was published by Routledge in 2017.

Anne Brewster reviews The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar

August 29, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Mother Wound

Amani Haydar

Panmacmillan

ISBN 9781760982454

Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER

Strong Women

Amani Haydar’s powerful memoir takes its title from Dr Oscar Serrallach’s term ‘the mother wound’, which describes how ‘the relationship between mothers and daughters is affected by unhealed traumatic experiences passed down matriarchal lines’ (333). In her family, Haydar says, the wounds have been inflicted by male aggression, war and migration (329).

If memoirists produce memoirs in order to make their lives count in the public record, Haydar’s memoir is motivated by the strong imperative to make her mother’s life count – for it to be recorded and commemorated publically – as her mother, Salwa Haydar, was the victim of lethal violence at the hands of her husband, Haydar’s father. Amani Haydar has a high profile as a writer, artist, lawyer, community activist, media commentator and advocate for women’s rights, and has talked a lot in the media about her mother’s death so I expect it’s not a spoiler for me to identify this as the event that galvanises Haydar as a memoirist. She herself refers to her mother’s passing proleptically early in the book, before the narrative has even touched much upon her mother.

Haydar spends the first section of the memoir establishing the close and mutually respectful (67) relationship she had with her father as a child and the way he had inspired and dominated her sense of herself and her future. This is a deftly written memoir which skilfully records the changing narrative point of view of the protagonist/memoirist. Haydar describes how as a child she internalised her father’s view of the world, and saw the world in effect through his eyes. This included being inadvertently complicit from the sidelines as a child in his disparagement of her mother. Haydar recognises all too late that her father’s pattern of coercive, controlling, belittling and intimidating behaviour comprises the gendered domestic abuse that would prove fatal to her mother (91). The memoir thus traces Amani Haydar’s rites of passage as she comes to understand the functions of patriarchy as they intersect with gender and race. It describes her dissatisfactions with mainstream feminism and her efforts to ‘carve out’ (58) a feminism that would account for these intersectional complexities.

The feminism that The Mother Wound articulates is informed by scholarship (in particular the history of Muslim women’s writing and feminists working in Islamic frameworks), grass-roots and local activism, and debates on social media. This repurposed feminism allows Haydar to address issues such as the pernicious stereotyping of Arab and Muslim people in the media (for example, the correlations of Muslims with violence), and to challenge the entrenched binaries that promulgate these stereotypes (such as the binary of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ which besets representations of CaLD communities and individuals, a binary mobilised by both the mainstream media and her father’s family alike, to the detriment of Muslim and Arab women).

Haydar identifies the ‘double bind’ that Muslim woman activists and survivors of gendered abuse often find themselves in of having to fend off Islamphobia on the one hand and to challenge patriarchy in their own communities on the other (304). This can result in self-censorship and a reluctance on the part of Muslim and Arab women to ‘share their truth freely’ (304). Haydar’s memoir makes an important contribution to Australian public life in countering this silence and I urge all Australians to buy and read this important book. Beautifully-written, intelligent and passionate, The Mother Wound is profoundly moving in its bravery and breathtakingly astute in its analysis of the operations of race, gender and class. It makes a paradigm-shifting contribution to the genre of life-writing and memoir in Australia.

In the course of reading this book I enthusiastically recommended it to a number of white friends and colleagues. It elicited virtually the same response: ‘oh, that sounds a bit grim’. Why are some things just too unpalatable for white readers? Haydar talks a lot about the lack – in the period following her mother’s death – of the recognition of and adequate ethical responses to her and her sisters’ grief: from her father’s family, the community, the mainstream media and other actors. The book forcefully draws my attention to a significant component of toxic whiteness – its refusal to acknowledge and commemorate the griefs of minoritised peoples and respectfully accord them mainstream space in public culture.

If Amani Haydar’s memoir is a commemoration of her mother and her untimely passing before she had time to realise the many different goals and ambitions of her public and private life, it is also a gesture to her grandmother and her shocking death in the South Lebanon conflict some years earlier. Haydar’s Teta was in a civilian convoy of three vehicles travelling through the countryside to escape shelling when they are killed in an apparently inexplicable Israeli drone attack. As one of her relatives stated: ‘there was nothing around the area where we were attacked, only fruit orchards – no people and no fighters. It was an empty area… we were clearly civilians, we had white flags’ (69).

Haydar meditates on the fact that the mortalities occasioned by war can leave people with a feeling of helplessness, and the sense that there is no recourse to justice. In her work as a lawyer she had attended a workshop on the investigation of war crimes with lawyers and investigators who had worked at the Hague Convention. She found the statistics of civilian mortalities particularly disturbing; ‘In modern warfare it is estimated that eighty per cent of casualties are civilians and seventy per cent of those civilians are estimated to be women and children’ (54). The rationale of ‘acceptable collateral in military operation[s]’ (55) was equally disturbing for her, given her family history. As the only Arab in the room at the workshop she was acutely aware that her own proximity to the Israeli-Lebanese war made her uncomfortable and distressed with the approach of the workshop to this material on civilian deaths which was on occasion cheerful and even jocular (55).

Haydar’s memoir demonstrates the many ways that war intrudes into diasporic peoples’ lives, not just in professional settings like the workshop but also their private living rooms: her family received news of Haydar’s Teta’s death in a tv news report. Hearing of her mother’s violent death with no warning in this way was deeply traumatic for Haydar’s mother and other family members (61). Haydar’s memoir raises the question for me: how can space be made in the national social imaginary (beyond the significant memorials in local communities) for the commemoration of those wars from which diasporic Australians have fled? The memory of these wars already exist within the memories of individuals and collectives; how can they be recognised at the national level?

In its dual homily to her mother’s and grandmother’s untimely deaths, The Mother’s Wound forensically analyses the intertwining of gender and violence in both the settings of the private home and in warfare. It aims to record truths that often remain unrecognised and unacknowledged. This analytical and memorial work comes at a cost. Haydar describes her acute sensitivity to war and violence; even watching the normalised stream of violence on mainstream tv provokes anxiety in her. The imagery is overwhelmingly immediate, real and ‘fleshy’ (129), reminding her inescapably of ‘a heightened sense of [her] own mortality, and the mortality of those around [her]’ (129). She describes numerous occasions when journalists and other people seeking to report on and commodify the grief of Haydar’s family (on the occasions of both her mother’s and her grandmother’s egregious deaths), showed little ethical awareness of and response to Haydar’s and her sisters’ grief. These anecdotes about normalised invisibility of minoritised people’s suffering make me as a middle-class white woman very much aware of the risk Haydar exposes herself to in offering her story to a variety of readers and audiences; and of my own responsibility to try to avoid contributing to this violence and harm.

Haydar insists that in spite of their violent deaths her mother and grandmother were strong women. Although she was indisputably the victim of wrong doing her mother was not only a victim but also a courageous and loving woman, an activist who ‘fought misogyny’ (93) and who left a legacy of resilience, intelligence and helping others (254). In bearing witness to the stories of her mother and grandmother Haydar herself celebrates the spiritual resources of gratitude, faith and joy (307) which sustained her during her writing of the memoir as well as her art practice, her family, community and her activism as a survivor-advocate.

ANNE BREWSTER is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015). She is series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Megan Cheong reviews Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau

August 26, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Gunk Baby

by Jamie Marina Lau

Hachette

ISBN 9780733646270

Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG

Consumption and corporeality in late capitalism
A reading of Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby

After the deliquescent dream of Pink Mountain on Locust Island, Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is a wake-up call from a silent number in the small hours of the morning. Leen lives in the fictional outer suburb of Par Mars, a typical sprawl of shopping centres, housing estates, and units fronted by flat open lawns. Yet just beneath all the grass and concrete runs an undertow of surveillance and violence that feels both strange and strangely familiar.

The most remarkable (and terrifying) feature of Lau’s hyperreality is the Topic Heights shopping complex which Leen selects as the site for her new business: a healing studio where she plans to offer the traditional Chinese ear-cleaning services she has learned from her mother. Topic Heights is ‘a perfect centrum, the exact summation of every need and every personality of the people residing around its hems. Where we get our clothes, where we find things to eat, what the inside of our houses look like.’ (7) Conversant with the comforting ‘sameness’ of the shopping complex are Leen’s reflections on the mind-body relationship and her role as a healer:

I tell her I’m passionate about relieving stress and tension in physical bodies and that we often abandon the concept that our nervous system, muscles, joints and organs carry the weight of us around. So much of our soul lives in our eyes and our fingers. The rest of our body gets heavy from being a vehicle for it. It needs relief. We have to start from the nervous system, the mind. (52)

The hypnotic slide between the philosophy of Chinese medicine and anatomisation of the capitalist machinery grinding away in the bowels of Topic Heights speaks directly to the reader as body and as consumer. My initial excitement at finding myself in a setting so familiar yet so under-scrutinised in contemporary literature was gradually subsumed by a profound discomfort stemming from a growing awareness of the myriad ways in which a life might be manipulated, even choreographed, by the insidious forces of late capitalism. Like so much of the novel, however, this discomfort, as well as a certain heightened consciousness of the sensations experienced by my ‘physical body’ (grasping my phone, peering at my computer screen), felt necessary, felt like waking up after drowsing for an indeterminate period of time in a malaise of uninterrogated habits.

Leen’s liminal status as a new business owner affords her a simultaneous view of both the exterior façade and the internal workings of the Topic Heights economy. Even as she curates furniture and music for her healing studio, carefully arranging her face and her words in accordance with the tenets of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power to obtain and maintain custom, she spends her breaks luxuriating in the infinite showrooms and product ranges of K.A.G., a fictional but uncannily familiar international chain store that sells minimal basics, stationary and homewares. Leen’s own awakening is instigated by Jean-Paul, her housemate’s disgruntled co-worker at the Topic Heights’s pharmacy. Talking incessantly, Jean-Paul half-asks/half-demands that Leen drive him to a ‘discussion group’ where members of the Par Mars community use Heidegger and Hegel to dissect the managerial practices of the franchises that populate Topic Heights.

The number of men and white women who talk without listening throughout the novel underscores Leen’s relative passivity, or more accurately the practised resignation from which she observes the power plays that propel the world around her. Leen shares her narratorial detachment (or, as Lau describes it, ‘existential boredom’) with Monk, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Pink Mountain on Locust Island. But while Monk’s status as an observer is largely a function of her disempowerment as an adolescent girl, Leen’s torpor is a product of the absurdities and violence of racism. As a young woman of colour Leen is less an actor than a body to be acted on, a view frequently embodied by her male clients:

I tried to pass him a sheet. But he didn’t take it, just smiled, his breath under his pressed lips. His body lurched, tilting a bit forward, as if ready to impel himself on me. A foully carnal exhale coming from his nostrils.
‘Take,’ I said. Basic English, no emotive words.
I tried not to look where his dick was. He performed a sort of sneer and went over to the massage table, leaned up against it. He looked down. His body looked like a pouch compared to it.
‘You take,’ he said, this time using a slight accent, or perhaps I had become too paranoid at that point. He had a ten-dollar bill scrunched between his fists. ‘You take.’ (138)

Although Jean-Paul never seems to pose a similarly physical threat, occupying space with his words rather than his body, the entitlement and rage of his rants flow forth from the same arterial vein that carries the violence coursing everywhere beneath the suburban monotony of Par Mars. In an effort to bring about ‘palpable change’, Jean-Paul begins to plan and carry out a series of ‘Resisting Acts’ – strange but harmless pranks designed to unsettle any Topic Heights managerial staff who he believes are too accustomed to and comfortable in the seat of power. In this way, the violent energy that surges beneath the surface of the novel has both reactionary and revolutionary origins. Yet if the ‘late’ in late capitalism hints at the imminence of revolution, with its odd cast of misfits, Gunk Baby wonders who will be driving the revolution and where we will end up.

Gayatri Nair reviews Monsters by Alison Croggon

August 19, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Monsters

by Alison Croggon

Scribe

ISBN 9781925713398

Reviewed by GAYATRI NAIR

I initially didn’t want to review this book. It is written by a white woman, and as a person of colour (POC) who wants to elevate diverse writing, I thought it was important to only review other diverse writers. However, after discussion with a mentor and writer I realised that it is also important that we, as POC women especially, participate in criticism, not just of diverse literature but also more established writers. It is possible also to challenge and change traditional criticism by introducing diverse perspectives from diverse critic-subjects. This is called auto-ethnographic criticism, which acknowledges the inextricable link between the personal and the cultural and makes room for non-traditional forms of inquiry and expression. It is a way to quietly address the assumed authority of the ‘literary review’ or the role of ‘critic’. So, in this way it’s subversive for a POC to review white authors and writing.

Alison Croggon I think would appreciate and understand this. Her work Monsters – part essay, interwoven with part memoir – interrogates her role as a white woman and how colonialism and the establishment of the empire has caused harm, not only to those outside it but those who built it. She asks difficult questions, not only of herself but of the reader.

“This figure I see in the foreground, this me. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination…grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible …” (pg 160)

Croggon is herself an immigrant, she researches her family’s heritage through murky British military history to both South Africa during the Boer War and India; her family were foot soldiers of the empire. She questions how she can escape this dynasty including spending her formative years under apartheid – and the most racist country in the world.

Croggon’s descriptive way with words and unexpected adjectives and sentence structures demonstrate her expertise as a poet. The rhythms of her writing replicate the ocean and we are sometimes dragged within its depths. The references to other writers, especially poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath are interlaced with her own criticisms in unique ways. But the stories she tells of her family life and in particular her motherhood are glittering, told with both stylistic prowess and integrity. The way she writes about being a woman, her mother and her own experience of domestic abuse which fractured her life and relationships, and her later recognition of what it was is both compassionate and unrelenting. Her refusal to be a nice woman, her anger at structures that contain women is refreshing.

The critical relationship explored in this this book though is the one with her sister, which is sometimes hard to read. Their relationship is marked by cruelty and stems from their experiences as children, the violence Croggon describes as well as the anger is at once palpable, intimate but also sometimes uncomfortable in its intimacy. Their subsequent estrangement marked by their shared inheritance of violence is traced back in a wonky line to their history as colonisers. This is not an easy read.

“When people feel there isn’t enough to go around, conflict can be vicious. Maybe that’s part of what happened between me and my sister, that sense that there was so little of everything. There wasn’t enough money, there wasn’t enough love. Everything turned into a deadly competition. And we both lost.” (pg 154)

The book asks questions, but it doesn’t give answers. As a reader this can sometimes be frustrating as we are dragged along, it can feel relentless, and it’s unclear what Croggon wants from us as the reader. But there is also an understanding that the reader can accept that life doesn’t have neat conclusions and we can sit with her in trying to make sense of it.

Croggon’s critique of colonialism, which threads its way through the entire book, is her most interesting but also at times jarring. She traces a faint line through her lineage as colonisers and their cruelty to her family’s recent experiences of violence which led to both the fracture in her parents’ relationship and her relationship with her sister. She investigates the idea that like patriarchy hurts everyone (including men), white supremacy also hurts white people. Not only does it hurt those that are colonised, but it also hurts those that perpetrate it. Croggon explains:

“I’m not interested in writing a mea culpa. I’m not interested in throwing ashes on my head and throwing myself on the ground in penitence. I’m not interested in displays of my guilt or my culpability. Take this as read: I was raised in a racist, sexist, hierarchical culture, and just as I had to learn (am still learning) how to undo all the prohibitions imposed by the patriarchs, rows and rows of them in their robes like in medieval paintings, leading all the up to the Throne of God, so I am learning to unlearn racism.” (pg 241)

Whilst this is a novel and valid theory that deserves to be interrogated further, one of the problems with this assertion is that too much focus is on the white experience and not enough on the experiences of those who were oppressed. To her credit Croggon acknowledges this but some of it does feel a bit self-pitying and has elements of white saviour complex. Whilst it is a memoir and this self-reflection is important, there is perhaps too much focus on this narrative when she could have further amplified the stories of the oppressed. She does refer to other Black and brown thinkers like Audre Lorde and Ruby Hamad, but it also feels like a checklist in a post #blacklivesmatter world. This narrative takes away from the stories that need to be told.

Her descriptions and unravelling of the misogynies in canonical works are sharp. And the way she uses theory to unpack her own personal history whilst at times raw is also compelling. Croggon’s use of the English language is superb. Her condemnation of the empire, its inheritance and how it’s destroyed not only external, but her inner world is both uneasy and powerful.

“I was born as part of a monstruous structure – the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped, me that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.” (pg 160)

“Those voiceless ghosts, only audible in their absence.” (pg 35) By writing her own story, and asking these questions, she gives those ghosts a voice and encourages other stories by those that have been oppressed, to be told. In Monsters, Croggon also makes space for these questions to be answered.

GAYATRI NAIR is an Indian-Australian writer, poet and DJ based on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney’s inner west. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and has qualifications in Law and Arts, working in human rights policy, research and advocacy. Gayatri has been published in Sweatshop Women and Swampland Magazine.

Jackson reviews Against Certain Capture by Miriam Wei Wei Lo

August 19, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Against Certain Capture

by Miriam Wei Wei Lo

Apothecary Archive

ISBN: 978-0-6488079-7-1

Reviewed by JACKSON

The interestingly eccentric Apothecary Archive recently re-issued Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s collection, Against Certain Capture, which won the 2004 WA Premier’s Book Award for Poetry.

Like many Australian citizens, Lo has a complicated background. She was born in Canada and grew up in Singapore. She has Chinese-Malaysian and Anglo-Australian parents (Lo, About), and their meeting is part of the story of this book, which presents two parallel biographies, one of her Chinese paternal grandmother 梁月仙 (Liáng Yuè Xiān) and one of her Australian grandmother Eva Sounness.

While a prose biography may be lengthy and detailed, a successful verse biography is like a good biopic: it showcases the pivotal events, allowing the reader to extrapolate the story and its significance. Against Certain Capture adopts this approach, offering 21 shortish poems, devoting half to each grandmother. Within their brevity, Lo lucidly evokes these women’s characters and times. 

She does so by subtly deploying poetic craft. The life of 梁月仙 amid the scrabble and crush of twentieth-century China and Malaysia, choosing romance over money and giving birth to Lo’s father in a narrow room above a shop (Lo, Home), is given quick-stepping lines, free-flowing, fast-changing stanzas, and fragments of Chinese. A striking example is “Run”, which appears on the page in three narrow columns, suggesting not only the young woman’s literal and metaphorical journey but also the vertical presentation of traditional Chinese poetry. It opens:

Sometimes life
narrows down
to this
a path
cut shoulder-wide
into grass
two feet
that run
between the
rubber trees
on this
five acres

梁月仙
you hold
your name
and run

Through Lo’s skill with phrase and pattern, we feel the young woman clinging to her cultural identity while labouring for her family’s survival (“the coffeeshop / bankrupt”).

In contrast to 梁月仙, Sounness raised ten children in the dry, expansive Australian rural landscape. Accordingly, her section tends toward slower, prosier lines and more regular stanza patterns. Assessing the farmer she would marry,

she notes that his arms are steady, although his dancing
leaves something to be desired. As they move, she weights
his soberness against bandy legs, his shuffling
two-step, the smell of the farm on his collar. She sways.
(“Saturday Night Dances”)

These examples illustrate how throughout this book the style serves the subject matter. There are no egregious verbal gymnastics. As Andrew Burke comments, Lo’s “diction is so unobtrusive you never notice the words — just what they’re saying”. After all,

There are no pretty words
for hunger.
Only a thin white dribble
squeezed from a cracked nipple,
(“No Pretty Words”)

and dignified maturity deserves understated metaphor:

Eva rises, drawing her years about her —
a cloak of thick and silvering hair
that hangs past her shoulders.
(“Silver”)

Refreshingly, this book is written in the third person. This enhances the sense of intermittently peeking at the two families’ lives as if through a camera. Elsewhere, Lo remarks that she likes “experimenting with aesthetic distance. The practice of Keats’ negative capability … of writing without drawing attention to oneself … was in the back of my mind” (Brennan, Interview).

Sounness, especially, is seen from a distance. In an essay, Lo compares the experiences of researching and writing the two lives. She says writing about Sounness was much more challenging although — and maybe because — she was still alive and Lo interviewed her instead of replying solely upon others’ narratives. This made creating a coherent story more difficult (Lo, “Reconfiguring” 205–207). Perhaps as a result, the Sounness work tends, for me, to be less successful. In particular, there is a good deal of quoted speech which, although Lo handles it skilfully, appears to have been somewhat resistant to rendering in verse. These lines do not ring in my mind after reading like the ones in Lo’s own voice.

Nevertheless, the poems memorably capture the tone of Sounness’s life. Michael Brennan comments that through her poems, Lo “explores family histories with openness, sincerity and a gift for characterisation, giving detail and depth to the conflicts and prejudice, nurturing and love, of the strong women of her family.” He calls Against Certain Capture “an adroit sequence of poems” in which “Lo’s formidable grandmothers … are vividly present” (Miriam). Intriguingly, no-one ever describes a man as “formidable”. Lo herself comments, “I wrote about my grandmothers partly because we live in a world that does not take old ladies very seriously, when I feel that they ought to be taken very seriously indeed” (Brennan, Interview).

Sounness’s recollections are taken especially seriously in “Between a Mother and her Mongol Child”, which juxtaposes the book’s only foray into mid-line whitespace and chopped-up syntax (“connectthe wiring     start / the stop     heart     startstop / the     stopheart”) with a passage from Sounness’s journal (“It took some time before the Mongol became a child”) to vividly express Sounness’s conflicting feelings about raising a child with Down syndrome.

I hope that dated term “Mongol” makes you squirm as I did upon encountering it quoted by a person with Chinese heritage. One reason we read poems is to examine ourselves. As Brennan notes, Lo’s work highlights the “ethnic, cultural and political divisions and contradictions from which contemporary Australian identity evolves, as well as a vital and realistic picture of how the minutiae of culture and identity reshape us over generations” (Miriam). 

I would add that the reason Lo’s poems do this so well is because she chooses not to delineate her sociopolitical concerns explicitly. Hence, readers are free to experience her work on multiple levels, see its connections for themselves, and draw their own conclusions. 

Lo herself comments on this. Discussing poets she terms “hybrid” or “multi-racial” whose work she read as background, she says:

I was also bothered by a general obsession with alienation and the way in which the poetry seemed to become a repetitive performance of various poets’ marginal credentials. I wanted to write something that emphasised not only the relational and communal context of experiences of cultural difference, but also the positive possibilities of hybridity as a mode of being that does not have to be characterised primarily by alienation. (Brennan, Interview)

Perhaps the most important reason Lo writes about her grandmothers is to articulate her personal definition of hybridity, a theoretical term she seems to find apposite, but also uncomfortable because of its “dark linguistic history” (Lo, “Towards” 9–10). To be able to use it, she defines it as seeing oneself as a collection of cultural “parts” in “relationship with each other”. She comments that these “parts” are shaped by familial and historical “factors” and that by writing about her grandmothers, she is attempting to create a “positive” view of hybridity without forgetting how it is affected by prejudiced discourses (“Towards ” 13–14).

One way to do this is through language. The 梁月仙 poems, like Lo, use English as their first language and Chinese as a second (Lo, Home; Brennan, Interview). Because of their appearance and sound, the Chinese fragments significantly enhance the poems’ atmosphere. Lo explains that using Mandarin helped her get inside her grandmother’s head and milieu (Lo, “Towards” 16). It helps the reader, too:

花样的年华,
来如春梦不多时,
去似秋云无觅处。
(“Like the Autumn Clouds, They Are Gone”)

Um … something about flowers and years? I turn to Google, which translates the first line idiomatically as “In the mood for love”, adding wistful romance to Lo’s English version, which beautifully preserves the poetry:

Like flowers, the days of my youth —
they came like the sweet breath of spring
in my dreams, like the autumn clouds
they are gone where they cannot be found.

As Burke observes, this 32-page book is large “in intention and scope”. On finishing it, I felt a little short-changed! I wished I could learn more about the grandmothers’ fascinating lives.

I would also have liked more of the poetry to savour. As Lo herself remarks, “Poetry has to be about pleasure (poetry for its own sake) and it will be relevant and valuable as long as some of us enjoy reading and writing it” (Brennan, Interview). I have certainly enjoyed reading and contemplating this book.

References

Brennan, Michael. Interview with Miriam Wei Wei Lo. July 2011, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/cou_article/19021/Interview-with-Miriam-Wei-Wei-Lo/en/tile.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. Sept. 2009, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/14885/Miriam-Wei-Wei-Lo/en/tile.
Burke, Andrew. Miriam Lo’s ’Against Certain Capture’. Sept. 2004, https://hispirits.blogspot.com/2004/09/miriam-los-against-certain-capture.html.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. About. 2021, https://miriamweiweilo.com/.
“Home” FAQ. 2021, https://miriamweiweilo.com/home-faq.
“Reconfiguring a Necessary Entrapment : A Tale of Two Grandmothers.” Beyond Good and Evil? : Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region, edited by Dennis Haskell et al., University of Western Australia Press for the Westerly Centre, 2005, pp. 199–209.
“Towards a Particular Hybridity: A Beginning.” Westerly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1999, pp. 9–20, https://westerlymag.com.au//wp-content/uploads/2016/02/WesterlyVol.44no.4.pdf.

JACKSON was born in Cumbria, England, and lives in Australia and New Zealand. Her four full-length poetry collections include A coat of ashes (Recent Work Press 2019) and The emptied bridge (Mulla Mulla Press 2019). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, notably the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. Her awards include the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. In 2018 she completed her PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University, winning the University Research Medal and two other awards. During 2018 and 2019 she taught English in China. She works as a poetry editor and casual academic. thepoetjackson.com