May 15, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Luo Lingyuan was born in 1963 and is a German-Chinese writer. After studying Journalism and Computer Science in Shanghai, she has lived in Berlin since 1990 and published works in German and Chinese including four novels, two short story collections and numerous pieces in literary journals. In 2007 her short story collection, Du Fliegst für Meinen Sohn aus dem Fünften Stock [You Fly for My Son from the Fifth Floor,] received an Adelbert-von-Chamisso Advancement Award, a prize awarded to works written in German, dealing with ‘cultural change‘. In 2017 she was Writer in Residence in Erfurt.
The following interview was carried out in 2016 by Bai Shaojie as part of her Masters degree in German Studies at the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). The interview was originally conducted in German and the English translation is by Debbie Lim. Thank you to Bai Shaojie , Luo Lingyuan and SISU for permission to publish the interview in Mascara.
Bai: Why did you move to Germany? What led to your decision?
Luo: I have to say it was actually only by coincidence. During my studies at Fudan University I met a German man who was doing a degree in Chinese studies. That changed my life. We were in love and decided to get married after my studies. And so I learnt German, for the sake of love. Actually I was more interested in French literature and had even studied French for half a year. But then then we moved to Germany. When I arrived in Berlin, I could speak only very little German. My husband spoke fluent Chinese and in China we’d only spoken Chinese with each other. After we got married, I wanted to find to work in Berlin but it was very difficult because I hardly spoke German. I worked as a room maid in a hotel and a saleswoman in a department store. At the same time I learnt German. After some time, it became good enough to be able to work as a travel guide.
Bai: When did you begin writing?
Luo: I began writing regularly in German in 2002. The Literarische Kolloquium Berlin became aware of me and supported my work. Before that, I’d published a few articles in China. At first I only wrote short articles and pieces of prose but soon after stories and novels as well. I took a lot of detours and tried out various things until I found my dream job. My first book was published in 2005. But living as an independent writer isn’t easy. I know many German authors who live from hand to mouth and struggle in vain for grants and publishing contracts. Only a rare few can live from writing alone. I have to do all kinds of bread-and-butter jobs too in order to be able to keep writing.
Bai: Why did you choose this career?
Luo: I‘ve enjoyed reading since I was little. I‘ve always admired the famous works of Chinese literature and secretly always wanted to write myself. Even though I studied Computer Sciences at Jiaotong University, I never had much interest in it. I continued because it was ‘sensible‘. After I graduated, I was given a position as lecturer in Computing, which I did for two years. Then I decided to study journalism because I was looking for a bread-and-butter job that could combine with literary writing. I already knew back then that as a writer you always lived on the border of poverty. But it was during this degree that I met my first husband, which completely changed my plans. I learnt a new language and only after 11 years I became a journalist and was able to write articles in German as well as in Chinese.
Bai: Many migrant writers write in Chinese. Why do you write in German?
Luo: Well, Gao Xingjian writes in French, and Ha Jin and many other Chinese authors write in English. Whoever writes in the language of their host country can communicate an image of their home land much more directly. I’ve also read a lot of books in Germany about China. But each time I‘ve felt that the way things were depicted was somehow odd. The China that I knew was different from the China in these books. So I came upon the idea to tell the German people about my country, in their language. I hope that Germans can get to know China and its people better this way.
Bai: How did you choose the subjects for your books?
Luo: That’s difficult to say. I write what I enjoy writing. When I find myself thinking about something repeatedly, when my thoughts keep returning to some person, some story or even some city then I feel that maybe I should write about it. But my subjects often come from my surroundings. People ask me questions about the people in China and I try to give an answer through my books.
Bai: I’ve noticed that you’ve written a lot about China, but not Germany. Why?
Luo: When I came here [to Germany] I was already 26. I spent my childhood and youth in China, and the Chinese culture and my family have influenced me deeply. For a story, you need people – they’re the starting point of every narrative. And for me, it’s easier to understand and create a Chinese person. But it’s only a question of time. Maybe soon I’ll write more about Germany.
Bai: How do you manage the relationship between reality and imagination during the writing process?
Luo: The starting point is always reality and often even a concrete incident. But I look at reality quite critically. I attempt to figure out the core of the characters, based on what they think, say and do. It’s only during this phase that the imaginative power sets in. I ask myself questions: Why did this person do this? What would he or she do in other circumstances?
Bai: You’ve referred to the city of Ningbo in many works. Do you have a particular connection to the city?
Luo: No, Ningbo is a symbol for the rapid economic development in China. The city is much more interested than other cities in colloborating and exchange with foreign countries, but it’s not as well-known overseas as, say, Shanghai. I myself led at least two delegations from Ningbo on tour through Europe and met people from the city. Most Germans know of Shanghai in particular. The city has become almost a cliché and many Germans think that, apart from a few skyscrapers in Pudong, China doesn’t have much to offer. I lived for seven years in Shanghai and was very happy there but I’d like to show my readers that there are other cities in China too. If I ever write about Shanghai, it will be something special.
Bai: You’ve lived in Germany for 26 years. What are your views now towards China and Germany?
Luo: I’m still Chinese inside. That will probably never change. The richness of the Chinese culture with its vibrant traditions and deep thought, its music and reknown literary role models, still has a major influence on me. It’s such a powerful influence and can’t just be cast off. I don’t want to separate myself from it either. On the other hand, I’ve also adopted a lot from the German people, for example, conscientiousness. When I began writing, my husband once asked me how I could have made the same mistake three times. It unsettled me and I realised I hadn’t been very thorough or placed much value on precision. After that it was clear to me that I had to be more meticulous. The Germans are are very conscientious and strive for perfection in everything that they do.
Bai: Which experiences after all these years have remained particularly in your memory? What would be your suggestions for fellow countrymen who plan to come to Germany?
Luo: Above all, I’d recommend learning German. If you don’t speak it, it’s very difficult to interact with the people. The cultural contrast between the two countries is so great. Even finding a common topic isn’t simple because the majority of Germans have never been to China and know little about it. On the other hand, I notice that there’s great interest in China. Anyone who has ever seen China is fascinated.
Bai: When a Chinese person lives in Germany, they normally have problems with the language. But why haven’t the language difficulties of your characters been a topic that you address?
Bai: That never really interested me so much. The characters should have their own personalities. I’d like to depict their inner world rather than show every stammer. When the situation presents itself, I have in fact alluded to the language issues. For example, the misunderstandings that arise between Robert and the bathroom attendant in Guangzhou in the novel ‘Wie Eine Chinesin Schwanger Wird‘ [How a Chinese Woman Becomes Pregnant].
Bai: For me, your works can be considered women‘s literature as well as migrant literature. Women play an important part in your works. What’s your opinion?
Luo: It’s true. That has to do with myself. I’m a woman and can understand women better. I feel more confident depicting a woman. What’s more, I find women magnificent. Even where a man seems to be take centre stage, such as in ‘Die Sterne von Shenzhen‘ [Stars from Shenzen], it’s the very different women around him who determine what happens.
Bai: I’ve noticed that many of the love stories between German men and Chinese women in your works end tragically. Is that true?
Luo: It’s not easy for Chinese women being with German men. They are expected to be both „exotic“ and „normal“ at the same time, wonderful lovers and perfect mothers, intelligent parters, pretty companions, thrifty housewives etc. There is a lot demanded of them. But mostly they cope well and there’s a happy ending after all.
Bai: Many stories are open-ended. Was it your intention to say that one should accept fate and there’s nothing you can do about it?
Luo: Each book has its own style. But it’s true that I prefer an open ending. Life goes on, even after a novel ends, and as long as life continues, there’s also hope. It’s exactly the same as in reality. Perhaps it‘s possible to find a ‘dream man‘. But when we don’t find him, there are other possibilities. You have to fight for a better life.
May 12, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hao Jingfang (born 1984) is a Chinese science fiction (SF) writer, essayist and economist residing in Beijing. An economics researcher by day, she is a talented and prolific author who writes in the early morning. Her fiction has appeared in English in SF magazines Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny. In 2016, her novelette, “Folding Beijing”, won the Hugo Award, the second translated Chinese SF work to have won that honour; the first being Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. “Folding Beijing” was a finalist for the most prestigious Chinese SF award, Chinese Xingyun (Nebula). The story will be adapted into a movie, directed by Korean American screenwriter Josh Kim. Jingfang is the author of two full-length novels, Born in 1984 (2016) and Stray Sky (2016), a book of cultural essays, Europe in Time (2012); and several short story collections, AI: Mirror of Man (2017), To Go the Distance (2016), The Depth of Loneliness (2016), and Star Travellers (2011). She is also the founder of WePlan, a public education project aimed at preparing China’s younger generation for the era of artificial intelligence. This interview focuses on Folding Beijing while shedding insights on the diversified terrain of Chinese SF in general.
Emily Zong (EZ): Some readers’ online comments maintain that “Folding Beijing” is not “SF” enough. They claim that the story’s strong allusion to contemporary Chinese political and economic reality deviates from a more classical understanding of speculative fiction as a genre of scientific hypotheses and futuristic technologies. What is your response to such comments?
Hao Jingfang (HJF): There have always been characterisations of hard SF that focus more on science and technology, and social or soft SF that primarily imagines life and social scenarios in the future. Take the American SF writer and the translator of “Folding Beijing”, Ken Liu, for example, he has written a number of acclaimed works on family life and office life. So of course, social SF has its significance in inspiring people’s vision of future life and social relations. Any type of SF writing, as long as it is able to impart fantasy and open up future possibilities, is valuable. Also, different readers have different tastes. It is impossible to meet everyone’s needs. Some people find hard SF intriguing, while others find it challenging to turn a second page. This is a matter of readers’ tastes. If some part of the audience enjoy my fiction and feel touched by it, I will be very pleased.
EZ: Chinese SF is a burgeoning field within the contemporary Chinese literary scene. With you and Liu Cixin winning the Hugo Award, Chinese SF has also attracted a great deal of international attention. Now one of the provocative questions under discussion is what makes Chinese SF unique. What do you think makes Chinese SF Chinese?
HJF: For me it mainly depends on the setting and the protagonist. If a story takes place in China, it is already a very Chinese story. I think that for a lot of people, upon hearing that this is a SF story that is set in China, they would immediately feel a sense of discordance. It is easy to associate SF with Western countries, Marvel Heroes, and white characters, but how could a SF story occur in China? If a story allows us to overcome this sense of disbelief and discordance, it would count as an excellent piece of Chinese SF. As long as the fictional events happen naturally within a Chinese setting and among Chinese characters, it would immerse readers in aspects of Chinese culture, even without the writer’s intentional assertion of Chinese elements.
EZ: When SF was introduced to China from the West in the early 20th Century, it was equated with “modified modernity” and used as a vehicle for scientific enlightenment. This ideological and pragmatic tradition lasted until the 1990s when, with the emergence of a new generation of SF writers such as Liu Cixin, Han Song, Wang Jinkang, and yourself, Chinese SF started to manifest a more diversified vigour. Nevertheless, Han Song comments that Chinese SF is “a sponge soaked in politics” and “a diagram of Chinese mainstream culture.” “Folding Beijing” bears on a range of imminent social concerns in China from class inequality to abandoning female babies. Is this political and nationalist approach a distinct feature of contemporary Chinese SF?
HJF: I think a distinct feature of contemporary Chinese SF is diversity, which resists politicisation. Chinese SF writers tend to engage with a broader range of thematic concerns than national and political themes. If Chinese SF has a colour, it is usually grey or black, rather than Chinese red. Chinese SF is a heterogeneous field where writers have variegated styles. With an exception of Wang Jinkang whose fiction is more political, writers such as Han Song, He Xi, Bao Shu, Chen Qiufan, Jiang Bo and so on, place more emphasis on individual writing practices and artistic expression than social trends. A fair number of Chinese SF writers provide readers with glimpses of the present Chinese society, especially young people’s daily anxieties and the social issues that penetrate people’s quotidian lives. But this does not mean that these works are necessarily political.
“Folding Beijing” is not representative of Chinese SF. Actually, it is quite an exception in how it places an emphasis on Chinese social reality compared to most Chinese SF.
EZ: What do you think of the international acclaim of “Folding Beijing”?
HJF: Many people read and evaluate “Folding Beijing” in political terms, which is not what I intend it to be. It is my hope to have conversations with readers who approach the story as a piece of literary writing and readers who are intrigued by the scientific hypotheses embedded in my stories.
EZ: Is “Folding Beijing” representative of your work?
HJF: I would say, no. “Folding Beijing”, and my novel, Stray Sky, are exceptions among my own works that explore social issues. “Folding Beijing” does not represent my style. Most of my fiction centers upon the existence of human beings, including boundaries between reality and fiction, the ways that individuals perceive their existence and psyche, as well as the ways that human beings relate to the universe. My next novel, for instance, is going to interrogate how people relate to each other and the connection and conflicts among civilizations. I am more inclined to create fictional settings that diverge from the real world we live in and delve into the philosophical propositions underneath people’s outlook and beliefs.
EZ: That is interesting. Considering that “Folding Beijing” won the Hugo Award, some readers and critics may learn about you and your work from this novelette alone. Also, when reading cross-culturally, audiences in the Western market may focus on distinguishing identifiable Chinese embodiments and “authentic” experiences as more significant than the existential or universal concerns in these works. It is not fair to give Chinese SF the “political” label.
HJF: Reading politically is too narrow a perspective. For example, in my work readers should compare at least ten or twenty stories before arriving at an understanding of the overall style. Chinese SF is more heterogeneous and there are not many stories like “Folding Beijing” that reflects on Chinese social structures. Han Song engages with social issues in his novels, but his angle is more specific, such as probing into the institution of a hospital. Other Chinese SF presents a constellation of thematic and stylistic practices. Bao Shu, for instance, writes seven novels on the topic of time and time travel. Another writer, He Xi, has written a novel called Liu Dao Zhong Sheng, or Six Plane Rebirth, in which his characters travel across six parallel dimensions in order to save the world. The well-known Chinese SF novel, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, portrays shared challenges faced by the future of humanity. These novels address universal concerns for a common humanity that transcends politics and nations; such as the future of mankind, human-universe relationship, and human civilisations. We cannot pigeonhole Chinese SF into a political category. Moreover, the current era of China is full of diversity, fierce competition and unprecedented opportunities, which is conducive to the development of miscellaneous literary engagements. In such a context, Chinese SF is filled with multiplicity and potential.
EZ: The ending of “Folding Beijing” is heart-wrenchingly peaceful and ironic. As Lao Dao returns to his position as a waste worker in the Third Space, his border crossing does not offer a cathartic sense of social reorganization. As the novel describes, “If he could see some things clearly but was still powerless to change them, what good did that do?” The revelation seems to rest upon keeping “the Change” itself. I wonder why did you not write some imaginative solution to change the enforced class stratification or the individual’s subordination to the collective?
HJF: I tend not to write simplified solutions in novels. Can a single hero overthrowing the world solve a deep-seated social problem? It is way too naïve and downplays the hardships and pains we undergo in real life. Sometimes SF has dystopian endings. The literariness of a story does not depend upon its resemblance of reality, such that we have to pursue justice and dismantle injustice. Some types of fictional writing give people a sense of relief and elation, while other types make people see the cruelty of reality from a sharper angle. My works belong to the latter.
The theory behind “Folding Beijing” is the quantum physics system Hamiltonian, or the collective energy of a system. If we take the megacity of Beijing as a system, the three Spaces in “Folding Beijing” can be used to write the Hamilton equation. However, when the system energy reaches its maximum or a stabilised state, the energy distribution across the three Spaces is extremely unequal. That is to say, the ultimate expansion of a megacity will eventually bring upon polarisation of population and class division, which is represented in “Folding Beijing.” This is the natural development of the system, on top of which human beings can make changes. Human intervention may reinforce class stratification by exploiting the poor, or mitigate the status quo by attending to the poor, but there will never be complete equality. What we can concentrate on is increasing fair opportunities for all.
EZ: Speaking of fair opportunities, the affective choices of characters in “Folding Beijing” are confined by their allocated social enclaves. Lao Dao’s mission is to deliver a love letter from Qin Tian in the Second Space to Yi Yan in the First Space. However, after discovering that Yi Yan is already married and considering his own economic situation, Lao Dao accepts more money from Yi Yan without exposing her lies. Yi Yan’s distorted martial values disclose the demand of marrying someone of an equal status. Within such a highly relegated social system, where do we place elements that cannot be rationalised, such as people’s affectivity and morality? For me, Lao Dao’s savior, Lao Ge, embodies the mobility and empathy that defies imposed class distinctions.
HJF: For each character in the story, when it comes to making choices, they make a compromise between a righteous choice and a utilitarian one. If someone is under economic constraints, then he/she would probably make a similar decision to Lao Dao’s. Lao Dao’s choice does not concern justice or morality, because it is complicated to make a judgment about the love relationship between Yi Yan and Qin Tian. As a bystander, Lao Dao does not want to intervene. It is hard to tell right or wrong when it comes to love. Indeed, individuals’ affective choices are subject to various external influences. Everyone has a selfish side, but also a compassionate side. It is human nature to extend help and empathy to those in need. Qin Tian or Yi Yan would also assist others when the situation permits it. The problem is that, most of the time, when their own interests are threatened, the vast majority of people would choose self-protection. There is always hope and kindness in society but kindness alone is never enough. In many cases, our societal rules undermine people’s willingness or courage to exercise empathy so much so that benevolent behaviors do not guarantee good results. If reaching out to Lao Dao threatens his own job, Lao Ge would probably restrain from sympathising with him in the story.
EZ: You have plans to expand “Folding Beijing” into a full-length novel. Will Lao Dao unite other waste workers and revolt against their subjugation?
HJF: I am going to write a novel with “Folding Beijing” being the preface. The writing is scheduled from August 2018 to April 2019. When the majority of the population supports the current social structure, they feel that it is actually fair to give in a little in order to enjoy the benefits that society provides. As such the sustainability of social structures premises upon some people thriving from the sacrifice of others, so it is unlikely for any revolt or rebellion to happen. No. I will not finish the novel with any simple resolution such as a protest. It has to be much more poignant than that.
EZ: Let’s talk about time and space. The 2017 Shanghai book fair is themed “Map and Territory: The World of SF.” The use of “map” and “territory” here is a deliberate gesture to rethink SF beyond a linear model of futuristic literature, and in terms of the imaginative exploration of possible space and transformations that time can provoke. Given that there is so much emphasis on temporal elements in SF, such as technological progress and utopian/dystopian futures, how do you usually approach the time-space dynamic in your writing?
HJF: My understanding of time-space relationship is concurrent with the mainstream view within the science community, namely, time and space is limited but interrelated, and the laws of the universe determine our temporal-spatial thinking. Both time and space is very important to my writing. SF is not to mystify science. In my fiction, scientific or technological progress is not the essence, but the vehicle through which we explore borders of knowledge and possibilities of the future and the unknown. Sometimes our imagination of the future also prompts us to look to the present and reflect upon or rewrite the past. That said, a basic requirement of SF is its scientific accuracy. I can hypothesise on the basis of current scientific discoveries and inventions, but I will not wrap a story with fantasies or hypotheses that are discredited by science. For example, a number of novels in the Chinese book market theme around “chuan yue,” or time travel, in ways that are not backed up with any scientific logic. SF of this kind is not my thing.
EZ: “Folding Beijing” engages with dystopian topics. What attracts you to write dystopian SF?
HJF: I am not a dystopian writer and do not want to be defined as one.
EZ: In “Folding Beijing,” there are many arresting details and a good command of literary and conversational language, which makes it an excellent story that combines SF and traditional literature. In what ways can SF benefit from traditional literary writing?
HJF: I have never drawn a line between SF and traditional literature. Compared to traditional literature, SF creation has more freedom in terms of settings and plots, but SF needs to respect the narrative styles of traditional literature. SF can learn from traditional literature in terms of the excavation of human nature, the setting up of conflicts and suspense in the story, in-depth portrayal of human psychology and conversations, the artistic and aesthetic modifications of mainstream literature, etc. As for stylistic tactics, it depends upon the preferences of individual authors. The criteria against which we judge a classical novel also apply to SF, including the vividness of characters, the completeness of a story, and the strength of thematic expressions, and so on. By these criteria, I do not mean specific rhetorical strategies, such as how to depict a moon, which constitutes only the surface of a novel. I mean the in-depth aesthetic properties that are embodied in a novel’s theme, structure, and characterisation. These properties are what a SF writer needs to learn from traditional literary writing.
EZ: From your experience, what challenges does Chinese science fiction face?
HJF: My understanding is that there is still a lack of classical, groundbreaking works in Chinese SF. The main distribution platform for Chinese SF is magazines, and even though there are now some online columns and WeChat public accounts that start to publish SF, these channels are suitable for publishing short-length stories. There is an insufficient number of full-length novels such as Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. On top of this is the declining readership that does not respond favorably to some SF novels, even those full-length novels written by Han Song and Jiang Bo. The market for genre fiction is thus quite specific and narrow. It then becomes very challenging for new writers to get published or assert a place. Other ways of motivating the market can help, such as successful film adaptations. Personally, I think it would be helpful if publishers and the media could promote more SF works and present more SF writers to the public audience. The development of SF in China is certainly a slow and gradual process.
EZ: A pertinent issue “Folding Beijing” engages with is the relationship between humans and machines. How is this addressed in your new short story collection, AI: The Mirror of Man?
HJF: The six short stories in my new book all touch on human nature. The era of artificial intelligence enables us to gain a better understanding of human nature. In the process of configuring the differences between human beings and artificial intelligence, and the different methods of thinking between humans and machines, we can acquire a deeper knowledge of ourselves. This process allows us to detect and cherish those precious qualities within humanity that have been neglected, such as compassion and empathy for others, self-awareness, free will, interpersonal communications, and so on and so forth. We often see these qualities in children’s curious eyes and their sincerity.
EZ: Thank you Jingfang, for your valuable insights into “Folding Beijing” and Chinese SF.
Emily Yu Zong has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Queensland, where she remains an honorary research fellow. Her doctoral thesis on Asian Australian and Asian American women writers was awarded the 2016 UQ Dean’s Award for Outstanding Higher Degree by Research Theses. Her research interests include ethnic Asian literature, gender and sexuality, and literature and the environment. She has published academic articles, interviews, and book reviews in Journal of Intercultural Studies, JASAL, New Scholar, Mascara Literary Review, and Australian Women’s Book Review.
May 12, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Janet Jiahui Wu is a visual artist and writer of fiction and poetry. She has published in
Voiceworks Literary Magazine,
Cordite Poetry Review and
Rabbit Poetry Journal. She currently resides in Adelaide, South Australia.
Boat A Three-Part Sonata(dedicated to Ania Walwicz)
1 Agitato
boat turning tapping tap foot step few thing way that in a row going
but going relax rope tow hauling freakish noises the body against
the movement the anx ant barks anything land small space little
room small space rainbow sheets supreme holiday caravan react against
tow boar engine going river little space little small evacuate vacuum
space mars how to deliver from here alexander dera dura free react
mars landscape barren fields brown turn parch pelt flattened boats going don’t
want to boat a prison pristine trees pristine hanging blanket on the bed
supreme kiss past the window harbor label willow wire air passing venting
the pristine mooring the dock marina the trees lovely low hanging semaphore
tingle sore little rooms share one and many divide little waves going by
birds past the noises what can you see the supreme holiday on a dream
the stream full of sandbars the room full of waste little light movements
above a certain waist the supreme seven hours a day and i am blanket on
the bed the pristine waste mooring one stop after another the transform
from supreme to supreme big silver line the wave camel hump the leisure
dock forking into river the big divide the little space on a boat the
river of my polish rings my red loving ancestors the musical crowd the
pivotal island shot with birding fireworks the shorebirds the nesting season
the pristine they once wrote of taught the destroyer of destroyed the troy
of sadist joys the heroic phallustine pleasure the predestined royal treats
the beach the couplets lining up with ducklets and blanket on the bed riddled
with the unwanted and going going the boat rowing by itself the captain in
red riddled with ferry knots time by distance and end of bed to pleasure
of the treasure hunt the segment the segregate the sold off bargain returning
with instructions the boat rotate fast and stop the hit and the cordial
talks the disapprove the approbate the singular town and the church no
one goes to the tied up dot with the jewish malemeds the hello goodbye
hello again daisy ditty song for the boat the sung the won the unwanted
alone on the bed dreading the particular singular solace solicitude the
planetary plenitudes the higher and higher the sitting by edge the down
low and unwanted on a bed staked in a fork brushed by the waves the silver
tails of the fish the walkers the admirable the dreading on shore the dreading
on boat the similitude the placidity the shake of salt and pepper on ice
the game of luck won over by the unlucky the green water the velvet waves
the old woman needing the stick an arm a warm offer the shore the old woman
i becoming i am sloping up and down the river trees big and no one loves
2 Calando
swallow nest and pigeon hero rainbow in the bee-eater beak a little bee
the falcon the cliff face the valentine on a columbine tail the limestone
cloud the steady pace the rolling by the setting tide the avalanching myth
my paradise you are yet to convince a little react a little federate a rabbit
scurrying into bush the flying cormorant the xx the sewage pipe the big
tower my pyramids the react the cliff broken edge the mass structure factory
industry pyramid wrecked the tree lice ants the square tail kites the buoy whistling
the steps the ladders the grass the eye on the edge falling over the path of the dark
brown roots the plastic white the powder blue shadows the talks of society
the charged blank-faced snakes the runover the runaway the cast into the
water for bait the bleached white bough the witchcraft agony the tree
needs no one but water and sun so solitary tall crooked mistletoe-ridden the
watery eyes staring out of holes tearing harmony the sun on the sheet the light reading
various ways the water entertains the grey dead branches rotting roots the yellow
green
haste the once was hay country the dry plains burnt with dust the scarlet
fever for the slow swimmer the fast warning for the marital bug jingling jangle
chanting the seven sister stars the harbor reeds the floating rubber ducks
these were life for them a pair and another pair trapped in a celestial
light a room forever brightened with joy boils the resting things in a singing
paradise so soon passed the light blue in the afternoon the honeying girl
with no one to talk to the set up sacrilege spilling into over spilling and
with her pallid cheeks and tangled hair the tapping at window the passing
of a great rocking rings and rings and life in the water is in the deep
and thick and waste is in the thaw all revealed late in the season the sinking
boat goes cruising up and down the river the night cooling the hours wasting
seven hours a day in a car and forty hours on the moving monster on the way up
where to where to devastate the flag of carnage waving rows of carnivals the one after
after the sick and tired look inside the aquarium a certain look and hesitate
boat beckons no one and all birds stay away the high and low casual clothes games
niceties staked upon niceties games night after night and just as wellthe right lesson
at the right time the little space live with own decision the little checkas though in delay another hindrance to the vehicle a life unsurpassed pass
away unnoticed all power vested on the point of a gun aiming at the night
insects and run and run and one mistake is gone by the trail of smoke
thrown into the other side the nice and dainty hare of my dreams
upside down hopping running the afternoon sun the golden glaze the
mellow tanning auction of the barren soul and where have you been the owing
original the feudal kenturky the feud of father cloud and mother cloud the soup
of souls cooking cannot love cannot know cannot wake another day to work cannot
put on face to march row after row and away sway sway roll and unroll wave
and unwave another casual charade for the unthinking ones
3 Appassionato
going on land where do you smile going on land after a while
going on land searching afar going on land to watch the stars
going on land fair is my love going on land smooth as a dove
mooring with the circling kites
mooring by the reeds for the night
May 12, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
A.J. Carruthers is an Australian-born experimental poet, literary critic and lecturer in the Australian Studies Centre at SUIBE in Shanghai. He is author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011 (Palgrave 2017), a book of literary criticism that examines five North American long poems and their relation to musical structures and musical scores. The first volume of his epic poem, AXIS Book 1: Areal, was published in 2014 (Vagabond). Opus 16 on Tehching Hsieh is a downloadable eBook from Gauss PDF. The EvFL stanzas are intuitive works inspired by the prosodic dissonances of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
EvFL
von
| vain, jadeworsted, giantesque-bedizzened Sophisticated sponge 1
– assembles Distortion serenely ugliness
– noise realises quiet
– quailing bluster in accord ― pillory’ Prints
– unrelated parade parapluice at Bernice
– in shrill quiverbolt, in inapt
– sagacity, sweat shàpe sweeter, snéer suu ― suu ― shooo ― shooo ―
– hártlesse śhearlets go bough, bushì, enskied the skeńeid
– engineer tradition inside crudity, vulgarian flippancy,
– dollarheap possessing sillilý-educated fatigue throughóut unvanquished
| victim TOADKING ! HISSING ――
– untrained Ulysses,’
– logically unhampered selection from únreasoning,
– goal-God’s passionate-jellymass-development, fídgety, in
– aristocratic sunfishing, boisterous, of imitation,
– rinjehöhrts ― As damnation, tender-tissues-enticing ―
–
–
–
–
| void call pallor
– of hídden swish, folgendes
– ihn
– demands
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| vulgarian engines. Polopony brilliancy bluff ― scíence ― stagegiant
– ihn houses
– consciencelessness-centenarygarlanding-repugnance-arena-Poem (!) naughty circus
– twindles effective díctionary
– rest, Harry,
– on śtrength ―
– laughter, heartbreaking, emotional-Śubconscious Germans
– aloft in cloth
–
–
| ornate águe 2
– begán Unflèxed for me
– sabelfir up pálace Through ―
– contained approach Round fámishing; to púlse
– expectant grounds Array! shy wings aflow
– noon-demon-things directed Bĺooddrop śense
– ever grimace sćarlet banning sex
–
–
–
| on clamour:
– denseness caution ― eckshishtenschen ―
– escape amúck! receives
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–
–
–
–
–
–
| off
– aquiver never
– keeping Rackingly
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| orgasmlitré lifeworks ― Transition LifeLethe: fliest: balloon, balloon-afternoon
– poolstrung pinning thrálls at durst, mockbat’s spectral bright
– a plenipotent smile
– lone grey Gay Finessen scheel, weckWhat ― that? ― expectation ― preservation ―
– tücke
– inexuberant incessancy Fucks Jehovah; disappears unplumped Beurgrunst thine Thereupon
– suck-grave-smugness, as ẃell did ẃar attire
– sanitation thunder! society! toilet
– uTmost gŕandeur-meddles-magnitude, ćostly-chiseled Dinning,
– electric-ego language
| neurasthenic Moon, fastidious ẃorld 3
– immured
– late By dúll October’s-sober-dynamic Radiance. Matter
– effects Combústion There, but Gaunt-casts-Chárs ― désolate ― Uptorn ―
– scull loom Betwixt ―
– hatepale Cortège is treshed with Tilt, Blacknoozzled in Azure
– ojé Onto ojé, Orkm O Ojombe space!
– rests redéemer Flux-immense ―
– essence dim ― maintenance obsćure ― loamfragrantly down grey ―
–
| nightbrimmed earthcrucibles, earthtesticle immortal that:
– on Elsius Poke-Pőntius mortale
– noise, Culture:
– exiled ultramundanity,― Dreadnaught durlurvm pornèojaculore ás deed
– no far echo śpangled fŕom that juggler
– effigy-distinguished flea! off tiný-Exit-farce ― snookums’romping
– shade beflitt-spume-studded-filigree, ― finstruck-sensed ― unmánnerly ――
– strays thee: Music.
–
–
| necessity our Glossgreen Praise: Dappled Śulphur Face.
– ja
– revel
– illustrator ― by haloflavour ― mellow soothing Velvetune
– snotty-ripe
– tinwipe rubberwhistlebreak! For seen’s-Saint-strung-Bologna, Ghingha ―
– rainbow Jarman biding blue
– elevatet “Gottriese” ― hailes Hight and ćannot pike
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–
| navel śense as Strasse,
– novembertag Mefí
– jánuaŕy nædness dámhc paẃer
– assumptiv Ĺghting ― ony tánl cĺamers hunes ――
– recreatet scapel ― rýthmic fĺippanccy aharth ―
– recreatet wizzardry ― lauŕeld Ceaśar
– recreatet violńt Héartrythm ― VERMILION “Wetterleuchte”
– elevátet, exaltet, am íss Befĺatterd ― mhyrrstuffed ― SEATALEHostilLacheule ―
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–
These arose from free inspiration of rhythms out of EvFL ‘The Baroness’ Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven the German dadaist & are dedicated to her memory
May 6, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham
Edited and Introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly
UWA Publishing, 2017
ISBN 978-1-7425892-0-6
Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD
The significance, value, and breadth of Anna Wickham’s poetry extends beyond categories of nation and resists the limitations of such categories. The category of woman, however, is central to her poetics, as both a culturally ‘inferior’ and structurally imposed designation, and as a proud personally and politically conceptualised identity, and marks Wickham’s important and consistent feminist contribution to poetry. ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Three Guineas 197) are the words Virginia Woolf once chose to express this sense of solidarity with other women beyond national borders. Born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, in London, Wickham lived in Australia from the ages of six to twenty, later living again in England, in Bloomsbury and Hampstead, as well as living in France, on Paris’ Left Bank. Wickham is noted to have taken her pen name from the Street in Brisbane on which she first promised her father to become a poet, and the early encouragement of her creativity was to be a seed which would grow and continue to bloom despite cultural bias and personal circumstance, including the opposition of her husband to her writing, and institutionalisation. She was connected with key modernist and lesbian modernist figures including Katherine Mansfield, and Natalie Clifford Barney, whose Salon she attended, becoming a member of Barney’s Académie des Femmes, and with whom she is noted to have ‘corresponded…for years, expressing passionate love and debating the role and problems of the woman artist’ (Feminist Companion 1162).
Wickham’s poetry represents a significant achievement within early twentieth century poetry and can be described as deeply concerned with an activist approach to issues of gender, class, sexuality, motherhood, and marriage. These are all issues that address inequalities still largely unresolved, although in many ways different and understood quite differently, today. These poems may be playful, experimental, self-conscious, and passionate poems that are varied but always conscious of their position and their place in terms of both political and poetic traditions and departures from them towards an imagined better world. In the previously unpublished poem ‘Hope and Sappho in the New Year,’ Wickham boldly suggests both lesbian and poetic desire and a class-conscious refusal of bourgeois devaluation as she asserts:
Let Justice be our mutual gift
Whose every prospect pleases
And do not mock my only shift
When you have three chemises
Then I will let your chains atone
For faults of comprehension-
Knowing you lived too long alone
In worlds of small dimension.
A refusal to accept such ‘worlds of small dimension’ reiterates the inclusion of emotional, psychological and structural disparities, as have frequently been noted in her previously published poem ‘Nervous Prostration’, in which she describes her husband as ‘a man of the Croydon class’ (New and Selected 19) and in which she plainly and honestly addresses the structural and emotional complexities of her heterosexual bourgeois marriage.
In poem ‘XX The Free Woman’ Wickham outlines a moral and intellectual approach to marriage for the woman who is free, writing:
What was not done on earth by incapacity
Of old, was promised for the life to be.
But I will build a heaven which shall prove
A lovelier paradise
To your brave mortal eyes
Than the eternal tranquil promise of the Good.
For freedom I will give perfected love,
For which you shall not pay in shelter or in food
For the work of my head and hands I will be
paid,
But I take no fee to be wedded, or to remain a
Maid.
Wickham’s poetry is notable for its balanced concision and depth as much as for the expansive, inclusive, intersectional approach it takes. I am using the term intersectional to refer here to an approach which is understanding of the interconnected nature of oppression in terms of gender, class, and sexuality, although it should be acknowledged that the poems do not tend to address issues of racism specifically.
New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham, edited and introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly, brings together for the first time in print a wide inclusion of previously unpublished poems, gathered from extensive research into Wickham’s archive at the British Library. Significantly, O’Reilly’s thoughtful and careful editorship of this collection restores Wickham’s original versions of the published poems included, as well as presenting the unpublished poems in their original style and punctuation, giving the reader a clearer sense of the poet’s intention and expression. One such example is the sparing use of full stops in the poems, suggesting again Wickham’s expansive, inclusive, and flowing mode that defies the limitations of ‘worlds of small dimension’. Until this publication, readers have not been able to access these poems in print, and the majority of Wickham’s poems, over one thousand, have not been in print. Sadly, some of her writing, including manuscripts and correspondence, was destroyed in a fire in 1943. This new collection includes one hundred previously published poems as well as one hundred and fifty previously unpublished poems, making it a substantial and impressive feat. Wickham’s published collections, now out of print, included Songs of John Oland (1911), The Contemplative Quarry (1915), The Man with the Hammer (1916) and The Little Old House (1921) and she had a wide reputation in the 1930s. This expanded collection of her poetry then, is to be warmly welcomed and applauded as a timely extension of the available poems of Anna Wickham, following on from the earlier publication in 1984 of The Writings of Anna Wickham Free Woman and Poet, edited and introduced by R.D. Smith, from Virago Press, and before that her Selected Poems, published in 1971 by Chatto & Windus, reflecting the renewed interest in Wickham during the women’s movement of the 1970s.
These previously unpublished poems give further insight into Wickham’s experimentation, variation of form and style, and poetic achievement. Jennifer Vaughn Jones’ A Poets Daring Life (2003) and Ann Vickery’s valuable work on Anna Wickham in Stressing the Modern (2007) as well as that of other Wickham scholars, may more easily be expanded upon by others with the publication of this new extensive collection of Wickham’s poetry. Although Wickham’s works are now much more critically recognised than has been the case in the past, it is to be hoped that the publication this new collection will go some way to further redressing what has tended to be seen as a baffling lack of critical attention for such an important poet. Equally importantly though, the publication of this collection opens out an expanded world of Wickham’s writings to all readers and lovers of poetry wanting to engage with a poetic voice that so eloquently and purposefully brings to the fore the issues of justice, equality, gender, and both the societal and personal freedoms that remain so crucial and relevant to readers today.
NOTES
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (Eds). The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Batsford: London, 1990.
Vickery, Ann. Stressing the Modern, Salt, 2007
Wickham, Anna. The Writings of Anna Wickham Free Woman and Poet, Edited and introduced by R.D. Smith, Virago Press, 1984.
Wickham, Anna. New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham, Edited and Introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly, UWAP, Crawley 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1938.
KATIE HANSORD is a writer and researcher living in Melbourne. Her PhD thesis examines nineteenth century Australian women’s poetry and politics. Her work has been published in ALS, Hecate, and JASAL, as well as LOR Journal and Long Paddock (Southerly Journal).
May 3, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hidden Words Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar
Edited by Lucas Stewart and Alfred Birnbaum
British Council
ISBN 978-0-86355-877-1
Reviewed by MARTIN KOVAN
I.
Hidden Words Hidden Worlds, an anthology of short fiction from contemporary Myanmar (Burma), is unusual in many senses. It assembles the work of seven established Burmese-language writers, and the same number of newly-discovered voices from a range of ethnic groups, translated by up to thirty literary volunteers into English. Singular not merely in its collaborative breadth, it is unprecedented: it is the first time in a half-century that such an ambitious and eclectic literary undertaking has been able to occur at all.
As well as Burmese, other ethnic groups represented include the Mon, Karen, Kayah, Shan, Kachin, Chin and Rakhine, their writers ranging from “WW2 veterans and rubber tappers to poets and journalists”: aptly eclectic for a document that looks beyond its purely literary status. Yet, Burmese remains the lingua franca of the whole, mediating the translation of the ‘ethnic’ pieces into English, as much as the speech of fictional protagonists (‘He spoke in Burmese, so all would understand him” in “The Right Answer”). Inasmuch as Burmese national hegemony is a frequent theme, it is also built into the production of the text itself.
The textual surface of the stories is thus a literal melting-pot of voices in which something of local lore and linguistic flavour has doubtless been lost from the specifically located original. On the other hand, much of the thematic territory and familiar tropes of ‘the literary’ (love-letters, metaphorical and real moonlight, journeys and partings, fêtes and rendezvous) are in full evidence, a time-warped tropical evocation of something like a 19th-century Russian sensibility. Family visitors meet, try new foods, talk, brood, sightsee, arrange foiled meetings and would-be trysts, and it is often politics that gets in their narrative way.
Stock figures of a Chekhov or Turgenev recur: bachelor uncles, adolescent yearning that discovers disillusion too soon, unmarried young women—not yet spinsters but not always hewing to the traditional social fabric of religious or social rituals of marriage, the fulfilments of family, of Buddhist renunciation, and happy old age. In a Chin variation on the theme (“Takeaway Bride”) young lovers risk separation by her potential marriage, for the dowry’s sake, to an expatriate suitor overseas. A contrasting, less anodyne, tale (“The Poisoned Future”) has an unmarried mother-to-be cast out to live among the socially derelict. Even the great Buddhist boon of being “given a chance to be born a human” proves ironic when, as a drunken grave-digger soliloquizes, “‘Like the saying goes, ‘where walks an ill-fated woman, rain follows.’”
A thematic comparison could also be made with earlier English-language Indian fiction of the feuding family genre (despite the absence in the Burmese context of the great social cartographer of souls in the Hindu caste-system). A prominent theme through-out, unsurprisingly in such an anthology, is ethnicity as such: its richness and divisions. At the heart of these (and another sign of something they share despite difference) are social celebrations that often broach geographic and linguistic frontiers: the famous Thingyan water festival (with its regional variations), local fêtes for unique traditions of music, dance and theatre, spirit rituals, monastic and political ceremonies. Lives from many social strata come together in these as unifying and discriminating at once: ethnic differences potentially erased are also re-defined in their purview (“The Moon…”).
“Reading the Heart” frames the same point in terms of a betrayal of tradition when a growing boy derides, from his own inexperience, efforts to present his local traditions to a national public (his seaside Hsalon village newly crammed with city ‘VIPs’, a term he doesn’t understand) in such a way that the authentic is made fake. But like other figures in these stories of innocence (lost) he only half realises the fact, or only until it is too late to reverse it. Other signalled differences are starkly racial: a darker skin colour signifies (as it tends to generally in South Asia) a lower class which is not just a marker of education or savvy, but also of aesthetic values.
Read in their benign literary contexts, these norms are easy to pass over as an effect of the naïf that runs through the collection in multiple senses: in its simply-limned characters, a plain-spoken style, a fatalism in the face of injustice. But read with the background of recent Burmese history, the fictional surface of disquiet, in this case, is also something which dare not speak its name. Myanmar is a religious-ethnic congeries, but it is curious that no Hindu or Muslim cultural elements feature among these stories. Perhaps another generation has to wait before we can read stories of or from the recently expelled Rohingya Muslim population, whose real sufferings tragically reiterate those so frequently described here as the merciless deus ex machina of the military state: a faceless and unforgiving force that crushes first loves, marriages, literary ambitions and careers, dreams and hopes, underfoot.
For these writers (half of whom are Burmese) racism is not an overt cost of ethnocentrism, so much as a normal condition of tradition that would never think to justify it. Some of the fictions here downplay that condition in the same way a seeming majority of contemporary Burmese (Buddhist) public life does, and the elision of the two would seem to belie the open, national literature to which the anthology as a whole aspires.
II.
Along with a prominence of the carnival, one could suppose that the popular Burmese ‘anything-goes’ vaudeville of performed comic satire (nyeint) might be an irreverent background (of a kind that often sent its practitioners, also, to prison) for the narrative foreground of these contemporary fictions. If any non-Western lifeworld could reproduce the social conditions for the political-satirical flights of a Bulgakov or Kundera, it would have to be modern Myanmar. But here literariness translates often into earnest understatement, as if the fear of the people has for too long dominated their very norms of speech, and writing, as well:
When discussions of religion and community […] strayed into talk of the government, the Abbot would warn everyone: “Stop, stop! The walls have ears.” Then no one dared utter another word. (“The Right Answer”)
The government-cum-military (with its insidiously anonymous intelligence network, or MI) figures as its own personage through-out: all-powerful, deceitful, unfairly extortionate, yet rarely if ever assigned any other symbolic status despite its ubiquitous will to destroy so much of the value the protagonists represent to themselves and the reader of local and national versions of the good and the beautiful.
Even a much-loved local tom-cat is a victim of unknown malefactors (“Silenced Night”), and in Letyar Tun’s self-translated “The Court Martial” it is a disobedient soldier, reflecting on a history of grievous violence for which, in moral if not military terms, he appears on the eve of his retirement likely to pay the highest cost. This story is also rare in giving an individual face, and conscience, to the faceless machine of power, ultimately prey to it, also, for no other reason than power’s indefinite perpetuation:
In black zones, soldiers went “code red”—cruel as sun and fire—though they needed to distance themselves from their targets in order to harden to inhuman purpose.
Plain first-person statement frequently drives narrative with a pervasively plangent tone, born of misgiving or surrender: not yet moral drama, or the classical values of a tragedy waged for a metaphysical truth won. Without overt ideological argument, many of the stories enter into an abstraction of defeat and resignation such that Lay Ko Tin can write (in “The Moon…”), past nostalgia, of his stolen and imprisoned youth that:
Our future was vague, neither black nor white. […] The saying ‘time is the best medicine’ was not true for us […] Maybe the heaviest burden of all was to stay true to our belief that the new regime was false.
The reader sympathises with repeated scenes of incarceration and injustice, without always knowing what stakes drive an absent conflict. It is not so much understood, as enacted, that even a meaningful resistance can sometimes seem to lose even that. Ko Tin’s concluding confession “Yet even now that I’m out, I’ve lost the moon that shone within me” (appearing to belie how literary success has won him subsequent esteem) could stand as a summary metaphor for many of the stories’ protagonists, no matter their ethnic background.
If anything it is literature itself, or even only its idea, that, in being so scarce and valued, is a frequent sole redemption of the worst of deprivations, in both its clandestine consumption and practice. San Lin Tun’s “An Overheated Heart” puts writerliness at self-conscious centre-stage. Where the romanticism of the ethnic stories remains conservative and traditional, this Burmese counterpoint is infected by an urbanity romanticising not literary redemption, but a very modern and ironic appreciation of its capacity to foreclose other fulfilments. One of its pedagogic protagonist’s students reflects on her teacher’s dilemma:
When you write, maybe you compare yourself to other writers, but you can’t […] measure love. Maybe you draw strength from your books, but […] Literature and love are not the same.
Many of the narratives have in stylistic common this mode of realist but understated homiletic, pitched between fiction and memoir, recitative or spoken tale. What often results is a social reportage in which historical events are frequently the pivot around which a minimal fiction turns: little seems invented, as if fiction dare not risk the imagined or possible. When truth-telling is such a prized and dangerous commodity, anything more than verisimilitude might seem profane. A thematic comparison could then finally be made with the European modernist and post-war preoccupation with the police state and paranoia, with Fate and Unreason, the submission and resistance to an impersonal, seemingly baseless power.
In 20th-century Burma, too, if less so since, meaning has been in short supply when speech is curtailed, its expressive powers denied any context in which literature, and life, builds an authentic identity beyond that of ethnicity alone. A malignity in these narratives is pressed by an unspecific Other for seemingly no reason than to make innocents or idealists, or their political exemplars (such as Communists in “The Court Martial”), suffer. Despite reference to Buddhist principles, such as their gothic gloss given by the callow protagonists of “Thus Come, Thus Gone”, religious truism seems unequal to the eeriness of events. “A Flight Path…” negotiates more mundane encounters with a deft obliqueness of address, in which wickedness (figured with regard to the Lord of Death) respects no sacred or profane status quo: “‘When you are the anvil, you must endure the hammer. Am I right?’”
III.
Hidden Word Hidden Worlds marks a hundred-year milestone since the widely-assumed first modern short story was published in 1917 in Yangon (Rangoon) in what was then still British Burma. Its editors stress that while the form existed in the interim through changing literary influences and political fortunes, both modified from the early 1960s by the vagaries of censorial military regimes, it is really only since the fragile transition to democracy in 2012 that a half-century of pre-publication censorship has been formally abolished.
What has resulted in this collection, under the auspices of the British Council, working with surviving local literary and cultural associations through-out the country, traverses formal and rhetorical modes of address, pregnant with a sense of life lived too intensely, or sometimes painfully, to be easily subsumed under one or other literary template. Many of the fourteen stories register intense experience in comparatively traditional modes of nostalgic memoir, stymied youthful romance (with some happy exceptions), or moral confession, in which any resulting incongruity between the telling and the tale perhaps accidentally endows an unadorned form with a force it might otherwise lack.
A number of stories offer graceful homage to oral storytelling (such as “The Love of Ka Nya Maw” and “Kaw Tha Wah the Hunter” to Kayah and Karen traditions, respectively). Yet it is hard to sense, given the thousand year-old generic oral traditions (of soldier-poetry, court dramas, religious tales) how far such old style is transported into a modern English in a way that rehearses, or subverts, their old formulae, much as their sometimes wry irreverence does the political repression that for so long kept idiosyncrasy and experiment from an open literary culture.
The tension between an implicit experimental could-be and the (in the Burmese case, quite literal) safety of the formally familiar is an unspoken feature of the whole. Only an occasional piece (such as “Silenced Night”) is editorially signalled as exemplifying a formal and, in its terms, cultural subversion. Otherwise, a story such as “A Bridge Made from Cord” analogises lost love and the ravages of jade-mine exploitation in an explicit register:
This is what it means to be Kachin and dream of a different tomorrow: a jade bridge crossing over from poverty to a life free from it. I too became a […] prospector of unwashed stones. We all found lots of stones, but almost none of them were jade.
Many of the stories similarly mark a threefold division reflective of the social ones that have seen decades of civil insurgency in the north, north-east and east of the country, between the ethnic Bamar (Burmese-language) majority who still dominate the cultural and political elites, the ‘ethnic’ non-Bamar cultures and languages, and the national (read, Burmese) army which, especially during the long periods of dictatorship (1960s to 1990s) sought to actively diminish both.
“A Pledge of Love…” effectively traverses the geography, and broken loyalties, of all three, figured in the confluence of northern rivers forming the Ayeyarwaddy River, itself dividing the country as the non-aligned narrator is from her lost rebel lover. Only rarely (as in “The Court Martial”) does the fictional frame seek a more objective view of the whole, unless the transfiguring properties of fable (in which heroes overcome, tradition holds firm, and the real is attenuated) perform that function of imagination.
The prospect of a cultural project such as this one was impossible during the many (ongoing) periods of civil war, and during ceasefire too precarious to sustain. The anthology is to be welcome for the fact that seven of these hitherto repressed ethnic identities can now freely be read not only in their own, in some cases formerly outlawed (the Kayah) or otherwise regenerated languages and scripts (the Chin, over a century old; the Mon, one-thousand five hundred years old), and also Burmese, but finally into a 21st-century English, as well.
Times in Myanmar, at least in nascent literary terms, have remarkably changed. Where the eloquence of silence or dissimulation has of course played a powerful role in post-War European resistance to oppression, in Myanmar it has for decades been a literal imperative, and we can’t yet speak fully, even in the expressive terms of national literature(s), of a ‘Burmese thaw’. Hidden Word Hidden Worlds is however a brave and notable first step towards its real possibility.
MARTIN KOVAN is an Australian writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He has lived in Europe and South Asia for long periods, and also pursues academic research in Buddhist ethics, philosophy and religion, including political conditions in Tibet and Burma-Myanmar. In Australia his writing has appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Island Magazine, Australian Poetry Journal, Westerly, Southerly Journal, Peril Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, and Overland Literary Journal, and in publications in the U.S., France, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, Czech Republic and the U.K.
March 31, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brianna Bullen is a Deakin University PhD student writing a creative thesis on memory in science fiction. She has had work published in journals including LiNQ, Aurealis, Verandah, Voiceworks, and Buzzcuts. She won the 2017 Apollo Bay short story competition and placed second in the 2017 Newcastle Short Story competition.
The Last Giant Panda
Every morning, the worker put on her panda suit to work with the cubs. They did not want human intervention, and yet they asked this of her. The cubs needed to be taught how to be pandas. Every night, she would clock off work at six and shed herself, before getting into a different suit. Her panda body would be a corpse on the floor, before it was strung up on a coat hanger and put away for the next day. Her large head would sit on the upper shelves, staring down at her with large felt eyes, which obscured how small the eye holes and field of vision actually were.
She had the job for two years when talks began for automation; a robot panda would not bare the scent of humans, and would not make them reliant on human contact. She argued a robot would deprive them of spontaneity, the ability to respond to their personalities and play, and would not give them the genuine love and experience that came with touching another living biological organism. There was connection there a machine could not emulate, as much as they would be able to model the appropriate moves and be . The zoo found her list ‘ridiculous, and frankly anthropomorphizing.’
The only problem they foresaw was cost: it was a large immediate investment for long-term gain. Her wages were much less in the short-term. They made a metal bear, and tried it out. It had patches of fur crudely glued on. The cubs ran away as the noise of moving gears was too loud for them. Her co-worker joked they some people ran from cars and construction machines when they were first introduced. It would take time.
The engineers worked to decrease the sound and artificial movements of the machine. They observed footage of pandas moving, coding their rolling lumber into circuitry. Advanced artificial intelligence was programmed in, enabling them to respond to the environment and actions of the cubs to an individual degree. They claimed by the end, none of them could tell the difference between beast and machine. Some even spoke of ending the breeding program all together; it was a waste of time and resources. Pandas could be replaced by machines, and the public would not know the difference.
She told them they were not watching the pandas closely enough.
They decommissioned the program shortly after the zoo’s management overheard these plans. The head engineer was later found hanging in her apartment. These events may or may not have been related.
She got her job back, and her suit.
She saw the bi-color babies through her limited lens. Inside this body, they were her own. She let them crawl on her chest, their heavy fat and muscle compressing down, but she did not complain. They chewed on her fake face. Bat with claws. She’d push them over when they got too rough, and sometimes just for fun, and watch them roll over like giant pom-poms. They were as serene as little Buddha, with tragic black eyes. In their simulated natural environment, bamboo shot up in stratified straight lines. Plush green glass took up all the color of her city, the panda’s black and white making her feel peppermint-flavored peace. She had raised six before the automaton, watched them grow up into sulkier teens, their eye markings taking on the brand of teenage Gothic rebellion. Then she’d get reassigned when they no longer needed her. Her latest two were already starting to grow, nearly matching her sixty kilograms. She was grateful for their remaining time. With any luck, they would not be the last pandas. Her supervisors, however, thought there was something changed about them. Something wrong. They were more curious and adventurous than they should have been. In the wild, this would have been a problem. Thankfully, they were safe inside their glass, little living biology specimens.
The last panda in the wild died on a Saturday. She continued with her work until the Thursday, but something integral and unnamable had been lost. She resigned the following Monday, citing irreconcilable differences with the world.
Three days later, her first cub was introduced to the breeding program. Given a diet of bamboo shoots and panda porn, the zoo was hopeful for success.
March 22, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Poetry
Winner: Constitution by Amelia Dale (Inken Publisch) 
Dense, witty, distressing, radical, this non-fiction poetry exposes the redundancy of media discourse, theory and legal frameworks that underpin patriarchal agency, white settler space, and authorship. The layering of poetic structure into constitutional elements highlights the way discourse can be manipulated to postpone reform and to partner coalitions between poetry, politics and nation. The design and satirical appropriation of paratexts as frames is timely and highly original.
Shortlisted:
Argosy by Bella Li (Vagabond)
The Honeymoon Stage by Oscar Schwartz, (Giramondo)
In Some Ways Dingo Melody Paloma, (Rabbit Poetry)
Fiction
Winner: Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria by Brian Castro (Giramondo)
With its dark ironies and playful liberties of form there is mastery and joy in this verse novel. Castro’s musicality, anagrams and puns interpolate the banal with the absurd in 34 cantos that riff on The Divine Comedy as they tell the story of the last days of cancer fugitive and Adelaide architect, Lucian Gracq. This superb novel is innovative, thoughtful, comforting and profound.
Shortlisted:
Rubik by Elizabeth Tan, (Brio)
The Last Days of Jeanne D’Arc by Ali Alizadeh (Giramondo)
My Life and Other Fictions by Michael Giacometti (Spineless Wonders)
Non-fiction
Winner: Mirror Sydney by Vanessa Berry (Giramondo)
Described as an off-piste urban field manual, this book walks us through a psycho geography where alternative narratives find space between the icons, infrastructure, wharves and freeways. Historical layering, speculative flourishes and the rhetoric of maps shape the city’s ethical and hybrid possibilities. An extended meditation on time, space, history and urban subjectivity.
Shortlisted:
Scoundrel Days by Brentley Frazer (UQP)
A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan (TEXT)
The Book of Thistles by Noëlle Janaczewska (UWA Publishing)
Best Anthology
Winner: Shaping the Fractured Self Ed. Heather Taylor-Johnson (UWA Publishing)
This anthology permits poetry and life-writing to speak to one another in a profound act of healing. Encompassing contributions by poets suffering from physical and mental, chronic and inherited illness, it is beautifully presented, meticulously edited and remedies what Virginia Woolf described as the ‘poverty of the language of illness.’
Shortlisted:
Too Deadly, (UsMobWriting)
The Best Australian Poems 2017 Ed Sarah Holland-Batt (Black Inc)
The Australian Face, essays from the Sydney Review of Books, Ed Catriona Menzies Pike and James Ley (Giramondo)
March 22, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Lost Culavamsa: or the Unimportance of Being Earnest
about Aryan & Dravidian
a play, by Ernest Macintyre
Vigitha Yapa Publications (Colombo, Sri Lanka), 2018
ISBN 978-955-665-319-9
Reviewed by ADAM RAFFEL
In February 2016, in the best traditions of suburban amateur theatre, a group of Sydneysiders of Sri Lankan background performed a play called The Lost Culavamsa (pronounced choo-la-vam-sa) written and directed by fellow thespian and playwright Ernest Macintyre at the Lighthouse Theatre in the grounds of Macquarie University. I had the privilege of co-directing this play as Ernest Macintyre himself was in poor health at the time. I have known the playwright for over 40 years and I was happy to oblige. It was a delightful rewriting of Oscar Wilde’s witty comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest, about late Victorian English snobbery transplanted to an equally snobbish colonial setting in British Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the 1930s. Ernest Macintyre had created an enjoyable piece of comic theatre about mistaken identity while engaging the audience with deeper questions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. Macintyre has re-imagined and re-worked Wilde’s play into a satire about the absurdity of racism and communal division. A play for our times and the universality of its theme won’t be lost on audiences who have never heard of Ceylon or Sri Lanka.
However Macintyre is showing a mirror to Sri Lankans in particular. Many of the intricacies and details of the dialogue of The Lost Culavamsa will resonate especially to Sri Lankan audiences just emerging from a 30 year civil war that concluded in 2009. It was nothing short of a national trauma for that island and its inhabitants. At the core of the war was what it is to be a Sri Lankan. The island’s 2500 year written history was deployed by nationalists to justify and push political agendas. The Culavamsa is an ancient Sinhalese chronicle somewhat like the Anglo Saxon Chronicle or Beowulf written in the about the same time in the 7th or 8th century AD, which was the later version of a more ancient Sinhalese chronicle called the Mahavamsa that chronicled the ancient history of the island from the 5th century BC. These were written in poetic form like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, part history part mythology, and were “weaponised” by nationalists where ancient battles were used as dramatic props in a very 20th and 21st century civil war. Viewed in this context The Lost Culavamsa can be seen as much needed comic relief for a war weary country with a core message of tolerance. Macintyre has deployed the best comic traditions of English theatre to communicate this message to audiences in general and to Sri Lankan audiences in particular. Ironically Macintyre uses the English language in this context not as a symbol of colonial oppression, which it was at one point in Sri Lanka’s history, but as a language of unity and of liberation from the tyranny of ethnic hatred and division. Macintyre shows that English can be a used as a link language between the communities in Sri Lanka, uniting them so they can share their stories. In other words English can be appropriated as a Sri Lankan language. So Macintyre sets his play in the late afternoon of the British Empire as a means to communicate to Sri Lankans how they once were and not to feel ashamed or nostalgic but to learn and accept that colonialism changed the country forever and in Lady Panabokka’s words (the character based on Lady Bracknell) “that humans go forward, not backwards and whether the British Empire lasts or not, it is a stage in the forward motion of civilization”.
These lines uttered by Lady Panabokka underline Macintyre’s view that history cannot be undone. Whether Sri Lankans like it or not colonialism was a historical reality and now forms an integral part of its history. Any attempt to wipe it out is not only futile but dangerous. It is a progressive view of independent Ceylon that drew upon the playwright’s own extensive experience in Sri Lankan theatre and the arts in the 1950s and 1960s. This was a period in the island’s history where artists, writers, dramatists, musicians, historians and architects of the English speaking elite (of which Macintyre and my parents were a part) were engaging with local Sinhalese and Tamil speaking artists in an attempt to construct a national “Sri Lankan” identity and vernacular culture that drew upon the best of European, Indian, other Asian and local Sri Lankan traditions. The milieu, in which Macintyre acted, directed and wrote in his youth and early adulthood still has a profound influence on his world view that a nation state consists of multiple nationalities, faiths and communities and should have a national artistic culture that draws upon its local multiple traditions while being nourished by international artistic influences including that of the country’s former colonial rulers. The fact that one can place Macintyre in the English / Australian theatrical tradition as well as in the Sri Lankan one is something that he is very comfortable with. An example of this is the first play he wrote in Australia in the 1970s called Let’s Give Them Curry a comedy about an immigrant Sri Lankan family in suburban Australia. Both Australia and Sri Lanka view that play as a part of their own theatrical repertoires. Unfortunately Let’s Give Them Curry was his first and only play that dealt with Australia. For in 1983 his world was turned upside down. The community he belonged to in Sri Lanka; the Tamils suffered a series of state sponsored pogroms where they and their property were systematically attacked by chauvinistic Sinhalese Buddhist mobs. Thousands were killed and the trajectory of the country changed forever. This affected Ernest Macintyre personally as he saw many close friends and family lose their lives and livelihoods. He used his vantage point in Australia to comment on the idiocy and futility of the endless cycle of violence in the land of his birth with a series of plays he wrote starting in 1984 and continuing to the present day. Macintyre drew upon his favourites of the Western theatrical canon – Sophocles, Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Shaw and Oscar Wilde to write satires, tragedies and comedies dealing with the subject of communal violence in Sri Lanka in order to have a wider conversation about identity. The Lost Culavamsa is the latest in that series.
The Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) characters in The Lost Culavamsa are a carbon copy of Wilde’s English characters in The Importance of Being Earnest. These Ceylonese characters also speak an English redolent of the Edwardian England of Wilde himself. They illustrate the extent of British influence amongst the local Ceylonese elite in the 1930s. These elites were loyal to the British Empire where the sun was about to set very rapidly. The Ceylonese upper bourgeoisie, however, thought that their world of tea, whiskey, cricket, bridge and tennis would last forever. Many of them thought that they were brown Englishmen and women consuming Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens treating these icons of English high art as their own and dismissing with contempt any attempt by local Sinhalese or Tamil speakers to re-write and translate works from the European literary canon. To them Ceylon was a little England where the general population was, at best, an endless supply of domestic servants and workers to toil in their estates and at worst something inconvenient to put up with. This exchange between Lady Muriel Panabokka and James Keethaponcalan (mimicking the famous ‘interrogation’ scene in the Importance of Being Earnest where Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack Worthing as to his suitability to marry her niece Gwendolyn Fairfax) illustrates the point:
Lady Panabokka: A formal proposal of marriage shall be conducted properly in the presence of the parents of both parties, Sir Desmond and I and your two parents. However, that is not on the cards, at all, till my preliminary investigations are satisfactorily completed.
(Lady Panabokka sits)
Ernest, please be seated. Let me begin.
James: I prefer to stand.
(He stands facing Lady Panabokka. She takes out a notebook and a pencil from her bag)
Lady Panabokka: Some questions I have had prepared for some time. In fact this set of questions has evolved, at our social level, as a standard format of precaution, for our daughters and our social level. First, are you in any way involved in this so called peaceful movement for eventual independence from the British?
James: It doesn’t bother me, Lady Panabokka, I’m happy with the status quo, the British Empire……
Lady Panabokka: Excellent.
James: But I have been made to think about it, sometimes…
Lady Panabokka: What is there to think about it?
James: That we have to lead….. double lives…..
Lady Panabokka: What is that?
James: Like, my name is Ernest, but also Keethaponcalan
Lady Panabokka: So?
James: Ernest is from the British Empire, Keethaponcalan from the native Tamil culture, something like a …a double life…..
Lady Panabokka: Where do you get such confused ideas from?
James: From a scholar I know well……I was told that sometime or other the British Empire will be no more and we will all have to think of our own historical origins….
Lady Panabokka: How far back do we have to go? To when we were apes? Before we were Sinhalese or Tamil we were all apes, hanging on the same tree and chattering the same sounds! Tell your scholar, obsessed with the past, that humans go forward, not backwards and whether the British Empire lasts or not, it is a stage in the forward motion of civilization….
James: Never thought of it like that….
Lady Panabokka: So many things you “never thought of it like that”. And there is the practical problem of the Indians. My husband Sir Desmond thinks our only real protection from the Indians is to be in the firm embrace of the British Empire. And the Indian idea that we are of the same stock was put to the test when Sir Desmond had to visit India recently for a Bridge tournament and found that the supposedly bridging language between them and us, English, was subjected to such outlandish accents, that the game took sudden wayward turns, the way the Indian accents misled the Ceylonese.
James: Yes, I have heard that they don’t speak English like us.
Lady Panabokka: Now, what may be, a related question. Do you speak Sinhalese?
James: I’m well educated in Tamil and speak it fluently
Lady Panabokka: That is an unnecessary distraction, I asked you about Sin Halese
James: Sin Halese……well, sort of, yes, to deal with the general population and…..
Lady Panabokka: That’s why I asked, because (with a sigh) the general population will always be with us. There is no harm, though, in knowing some Sin Halese oneself, for its own sake, but one must not carry it too far.
James: Too far?
Lady Panabokka: Yes, I don’t think you have heard of this man called Sara Chch Andra, a strange name even for a Sin Halese….
James: No, I have not heard….
Lady Panabokka: I’m glad. He should remain unheard of
James: Why?
Lady Panabokka: You know, Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”?
James: I love it, I played Lady Bracknell in school!
Lady Panabokka: It is one of our beloved plays, and this man, Sara Chch Andra has debased it by re- writing it, in Sin Halese, as “Hangi Hora” [Hidden Thief], whatever that means!
James: Really?
Lady Panabokka: Yes, I got it from Professor Lyn Ludowyk. Lyn was at Sir Herbert Stanley’s garden party at Queens House yesterday, and he actually spoke about it approvingly. Sometimes I really can’t understand Lyn….why can’t these people write their own plays and not rewrite ours!
The comic irony of the line “why can’t these people write their own plays and not rewrite ours” won’t be lost on a Sri Lankan audience. Lady Panabokka who is an English speaking Sinhalese sees no problem with The Importance of Being Earnest as “her play” and by “these people” she means the Sinhalese speaking writers who should be writing “their own plays”. She sees herself as quintessentially English who would have graciously accepted the fact that she would not be allowed into the Colombo Club which was an exclusively whites-only club for English civil servants and administrators. Lady Panabokka, like Lady Bracknell, sees the world as a hierarchy where everyone has their allocated place, which they should accept with grace and dignity. As Macintyre says in his introduction to his play:
So Lady Panabokka establishes early in the play, that … like Lady Bracknell, … her belief that what matters in life is social status and class. Even race maybe ignored where class prevails as it happens with many Colombo “upper class” young people, Sinhalese and Tamils …
Lady Panabokka who “supervises” this whole improbable comedy is the most identifiable of Oscar Wilde’s characters, the famous Lady Bracknell. She is transplanted. The whole plot, except for the meaning of ethnicity in Lanka which makes it a different play, is transplanted Oscar Wilde, with the colours, hues and texture of the plant growing naturally from the soil of British Ceylon.
In the final Third Act of The Importance of Being Earnest the relatively minor character of Miss Prism exposes the real identities of Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing to their respective love interests Cecily Cardew and Gwendolyn Fairfax. In Wilde’s play Miss Prism locates the lost handbag in which she left the baby Jack Worthing twenty years earlier. In The Lost Culavamsa the point of departure from Wilde lies in how Pamela Mendivitharna unveils the identities of Danton Walgampaya and James Keethaponcalan to their respective love interests Sridevi Kadirgamanathan and Gwendolyn Panabokka.
Macintyre has transformed Miss Prism’s character Pamela Mendivitharna to a major role on a par with Lady Panabokka (the Lady Bracknell character). Pamela is a scholar who lost the baby James in Colombo in a malla (a shopping bag made of treated palm leaves) together with a copy of the Culavamsa. She was a governess to this baby James whose biological mother was Lady Muriel Panabokka’s sister and also Danton Walgampaya’s mother who was Sinhalese (Aryan). Pamela lived with baby James’s parents while pursuing her research into the ancient history of the Aryans and Dravidians in Sri Lanka, which was also a popular pastime of British civil servants and orientalists in Ceylon during that period. Baby James was found by a Jaffna Tamil couple Sir Kandiah and Lady Keethaponcalan and adopted him as their own in a Tamil (Dravidian) environment. Pamela eventually traced baby James to Jaffna and found employment with the Keethaponcalans as James’s nanny. As Macintyre says in his introduction:
Why in this story is there a copy of the Culavamsa … also inside the malla with the baby? The Culavamsa’s part in the play is to link up this story with, arguably, character as big and important to the story … Pamela Mendivitharna, the lady who was responsible for the baby in her paid care …
While this baby [James] born into a Sinhalese family grows up as a Tamil, Pamela Mendivitharna … begins to doubt the well-held belief of the time [1930s] … that the ethnicities of Ceylon [Sri Lanka] resulted from North Indian Aryans settling in the island and South Indian Dravidians coming to the island as a different “race”.
The final denouement of the play ends just as Wilde’s. The only difference being Pamela’s explanation to the audience that the two blood brothers were brought up in different environments and each displaying the characteristics of the environment in which they were brought up. Her study of the Culavamsa was crucial in her realisation that “our ethnicities reveal social attributes, not biological differences.” This is where Macintyre uses Wilde’s structure to expose the fallacy of ‘race’ as an exclusively biological characteristic. The ancient chroniclers and poets of the Culavamsa mention different groups or tribes or nationalities but they could not have had any idea of the very modern and European scientific and biological concept of ‘race’. Macintyre’s play is set in the 1930s, a time when Eugenics and the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism were prevalent in Europe and United States in order to legitimise the odious narrative of white European supremacy. This sort of thinking also influenced some South Asian nationalists during that time as they appropriated these European pseudo-sciences to construct their equally odious narratives of their own national origins. Later on this would have deadly consequences in the rise of fascism and communal violence in Europe and Asia.
Macintyre, however, never loses focus that this play is essentially a romantic comedy. His close following of Wilde’s structure and characters in The Importance of Being Earnest makes viewing and reading Ernest Macintyre’s The Lost Culavamsa an enjoyable experience. Macintyre has transplanted all of Wilde’s minor characters including Reverend Chasuble who is re-created as Reverend Abraham Pachamuttu, the servant Lane as Seyadu Suleiman and the butler Merriman as Albert. As with all great comedies whether it be the films of Charlie Chaplin or Luis Bunuel or the plays of Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw there is always an undercurrent of seriousness and even tragedy. The Lost Culavamsa is, in my mind, no different.
ADAM RAFFEL is a Sydney poet and writer.
March 1, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
These Wild Houses
by Omar Sakr
Cordite Press
ISBN: 9780975249277
Reviewed by BEN HESSION
In a departure from most poetry books, the series issued by Cordite Publishing features a preface by the poet, as well as an introduction by an established writer, who in Omar Sakr’s case is his mentor and tutor, Judith Beveridge. Unlike the prefaces of the other poets in the Cordite catalogue, Sakr does not delve into overarching literary or philosophical theory about the ensuing text. Rather, Sakr speaks of life experience, observation ‘It is a statement – an exploration of me and what I’ve seen.’ (xi) Indeed, compared to the other writers, it would be easy to judge Sakr as something of a naïf. But this would be to deny his real ability as a poet, which, in These Wild Houses, sees a disarming honesty matched by an acuity of poise, nuance and craftsmanship.
Sakr’s collection opens with a quote from the prominent literary critic, James Wood, who in an interview with literary website electricliterature.com, speculated that in a society without religion and a belief in immortality, that not even houses would remain, since through the death of their occupants they would remain unattended. Houses, in the collection, have many structures, some physical others figurative, but each able to induce a real response. Aptly, the first poem in the collection is ‘Door Open’ which both suggests a threshold and a chance to view the interior. Towards this end, Sakr use of enjambment breaks open sentences to reveal something very human and even sensual:
Wild houses we
live in licked brick & sun
warmed stones, in grass blood mortar
and flesh. Listen up the halls, be careful (3)
later he invites the reader to “Come inside, let me/ warm you with all I am. Mind your head/ here on the ridges of my teeth.” (3)
‘All My Names’ demonstrates that “these houses” can be the nicknames one acquires, but are less than comfortable to live inside, which become the reciprocating metaphors for McMansions and housing commission homes which people must also live within, leaving scars.
An almost prosaic rhythm pervades much of the poetry in These Wild Houses, lend a sense of the unaffected or the low-rise ease of suburban living. Suburbia, despite this apparent sensibility is also a contested space, and Sakr’s choice of rhythm serves to make pellucid the innate tensions that arise. In ‘Here is the Poem You Demand’, for example, Sakr provides a list of identity markers one might expect from a ‘queer Muslim Arab Australian from Western Sydney’ that is both a strident affirmation of lived experience, as we see in
Here is the uncouth domestic abuse & plasma televisions,
the marbled fruit of my skin. (4)
and we also see in
Here is the mosque you despise, minarets pinked
by sky. Never forget it in the foreground (4)
and an ironic statement on alterity as a source of stereotyping or tokenistic spectacle, being on demand by the reader, who might not empathise with the sense of pain or struggle that comes with that experience and its articulation
Here is the noose I hang myself with
every day. Here is the blade I trust will sever it. (4)
The couplets in this poem show Sakr’s ability to distil of his world and journeys within it into economical lyric poetry. In ‘Dear Mama’ the longer lines ensconce the prosaic feeling, as they navigate the casual extremes of the poet’s upbringing. The second stanza notes:
Your god is capricious, strikes no reason, some days (the hours
you had full gear, I later found) you’d grin and order us a pizza
in and we’d lounge about our smoky temple as your silver screen
apostles entertained us, shot & bled & fucked & spat & died
for us. Those days were the best. Others were nails-on-chalkboard (6)
Sakr then details the abuse he received from his mother, and it is here that the restraint inherent to his lyricism perhaps becomes the most salient. In stanza three, motivation is stated succinctly:
You saw my treacherous father in the closet of my skin, my face
his imprinted sin. (6)
The line break serves as emphasis, taking over from words themselves. Economy heightens the severity of the abuse and the strength of the poet’s own resilience later in the stanza:
I remember when the locksmith came, his confusion, dawning
pity when he asked, ‘You want the lock outside his door?’ Your cash
and a small gold chain sealed my cage. How could you think walls
would hold me? If you knew how I made that cell a world, hard
but free, you might refashion yours: a hundred books, each one key. (7)
The enjambment and the use of the isolated line in ‘Harmony of Dirt’ allows a treatment of death that is not overwhelmed by the distraction of emotion, allowing rather to reader again to share in loss and its unspoken profundity:
All around him a circle of bearded men stood confronted
with finality, a father with son,
a cousin, with cousin, life with echoes.
His funeral made a Friday morning (54)
This poem marks the deep bonds Sakr has with family despite the abuse depicted in ‘Dear Mama’. Identity, as defined through relatives or community is fraught with various tensions throughout These Wild Houses. Identity for Sakr is Lebanese Australian, a hybrid of two distinct cultures that is constantly renegotiating itself. In These Wild Houses, Sakr is mapping its landscape. ‘Landing’ notes the children growing into forgetting the Arabic of their parents and grant parents; ‘ghosting the ghetto’, meanwhile, sees a sort of ersatz hajj taken to Warwick Farm in the Australian made vehicle, the Holden Commodore.
‘Call Off Duty’, examines the anxieties anticipating the poet’s coming out to a brother, who appears to be consumed by the virtual machismo of video game warfare. By implication, this might reinforce an incumbent, culturally conservative and exclusively heteronormative view of masculinity. However, the acceptance by his brother of his sexuality – besides offering relief – also displays apparently changing attitudes within the Lebanese Australian community.
‘Botany Bay’, takes suburbia as contested space to another level – but not without humour -where Muslim Arab Australians picnic adjacent to a museum for Captain Cook, the bringer of British colonization over Aboriginal land. The poem challenges the resulting marginalization, particularly towards his, own, Muslim Arabic community, with the narrator musing over a clash between the older Anglo hegemonic orthodoxy and the newer assertion of a multicultural cosmos, with its “hijabbed sky”. (17)
‘The H Word’, which was included in Puncher and Wattman’s ‘Contemporary Australian Poetry’ anthology, again demonstrates the power of restraint shown in Sakr’s other poems. As the “H” of the title is an initial to undercut expectations as it is to help trigger signifiers. “Home” for instance, is scarier than horror or homicide; whilst “a little H” is the italicised cry for help rather than the escape offered by what might have been inferred, heroin. The main “H” word, “hood”, and its variants, is a pun on the hip-hop abbreviation of neighbourhood, with one being emblematic or stereotypical of the other. As clothing it serves as a sanctuary from the straits of the narrator’s environment. Importantly, whilst Sakr is often explicit about his background and his feelings are clear, he indulges neither self-pity nor street-wise bravado. We see, instead, the strength of silence through the spaces between the couplets, which, in turn, endow both measure and powerful nuance to the poem, particularly in its concluding lines, expressing what he would see in death:
I expect to look down and discover in my chest
A hooded heart, lying heavy and still. (11)
While many of the poems in These Wild Houses are definitely gritty, the aim is not for a prescriptive aesthetic for Sakr. Rather, it serves to establish the profound authenticity of the poet, something which we see he takes to the United States in ‘America, You Sexy Fuck’ and ‘A Familiar Song’. In the latter poem, his situation creates empathy for the beggars around him. The nature of what Sakr has explores in the collection is probably best summed up in its closing piece, ‘A Biographer’s Note’ where he rhetorically asks the reader:
what is tragedy and how might it play
to see a life where we now recoil
from the stink of desperation? (58)
These Wild Houses has shown that Sakr has tamed the more formal aspects of poetry, rendering the extremes of his past and their attendant, potentially distracting, emotions is no easy feat. As a debut collection, it holds great promise for a relatively young poet. The recognition of his talent is evidenced by being a runner-up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and his appointment as the Poetry Editor of The Lifted Brow. Judith Beveridge, in her introduction, describes Sakr’s debut as” impressive” and says that it “announces a new and important voice to Australian poetry.” (xiv) He has invited us into his houses, most certainly, but now he has made us, his reader-guests, hungry.
References:
Paulson, Steve. ‘The Art of Persuasion, an Interview with Critic James Wood’, electricliterature.com, 1 July 2015.
BEN HESSION is a Wollongong-based writer. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, International Chinese Language Forum, Cordite, and Can I Tell You A Secret?, the Don Bank Live Poets anthology. Ben’s poem, ‘A Song of Numbers’, was shortlisted for the 2013 Australian Poetry Science Poetry …