August 29, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Mother Wound
Amani Haydar
Panmacmillan
ISBN 9781760982454
Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER
Strong Women
Amani Haydar’s powerful memoir takes its title from Dr Oscar Serrallach’s term ‘the mother wound’, which describes how ‘the relationship between mothers and daughters is affected by unhealed traumatic experiences passed down matriarchal lines’ (333). In her family, Haydar says, the wounds have been inflicted by male aggression, war and migration (329).
If memoirists produce memoirs in order to make their lives count in the public record, Haydar’s memoir is motivated by the strong imperative to make her mother’s life count – for it to be recorded and commemorated publically – as her mother, Salwa Haydar, was the victim of lethal violence at the hands of her husband, Haydar’s father. Amani Haydar has a high profile as a writer, artist, lawyer, community activist, media commentator and advocate for women’s rights, and has talked a lot in the media about her mother’s death so I expect it’s not a spoiler for me to identify this as the event that galvanises Haydar as a memoirist. She herself refers to her mother’s passing proleptically early in the book, before the narrative has even touched much upon her mother.
Haydar spends the first section of the memoir establishing the close and mutually respectful (67) relationship she had with her father as a child and the way he had inspired and dominated her sense of herself and her future. This is a deftly written memoir which skilfully records the changing narrative point of view of the protagonist/memoirist. Haydar describes how as a child she internalised her father’s view of the world, and saw the world in effect through his eyes. This included being inadvertently complicit from the sidelines as a child in his disparagement of her mother. Haydar recognises all too late that her father’s pattern of coercive, controlling, belittling and intimidating behaviour comprises the gendered domestic abuse that would prove fatal to her mother (91). The memoir thus traces Amani Haydar’s rites of passage as she comes to understand the functions of patriarchy as they intersect with gender and race. It describes her dissatisfactions with mainstream feminism and her efforts to ‘carve out’ (58) a feminism that would account for these intersectional complexities.
The feminism that The Mother Wound articulates is informed by scholarship (in particular the history of Muslim women’s writing and feminists working in Islamic frameworks), grass-roots and local activism, and debates on social media. This repurposed feminism allows Haydar to address issues such as the pernicious stereotyping of Arab and Muslim people in the media (for example, the correlations of Muslims with violence), and to challenge the entrenched binaries that promulgate these stereotypes (such as the binary of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ which besets representations of CaLD communities and individuals, a binary mobilised by both the mainstream media and her father’s family alike, to the detriment of Muslim and Arab women).
Haydar identifies the ‘double bind’ that Muslim woman activists and survivors of gendered abuse often find themselves in of having to fend off Islamphobia on the one hand and to challenge patriarchy in their own communities on the other (304). This can result in self-censorship and a reluctance on the part of Muslim and Arab women to ‘share their truth freely’ (304). Haydar’s memoir makes an important contribution to Australian public life in countering this silence and I urge all Australians to buy and read this important book. Beautifully-written, intelligent and passionate, The Mother Wound is profoundly moving in its bravery and breathtakingly astute in its analysis of the operations of race, gender and class. It makes a paradigm-shifting contribution to the genre of life-writing and memoir in Australia.
In the course of reading this book I enthusiastically recommended it to a number of white friends and colleagues. It elicited virtually the same response: ‘oh, that sounds a bit grim’. Why are some things just too unpalatable for white readers? Haydar talks a lot about the lack – in the period following her mother’s death – of the recognition of and adequate ethical responses to her and her sisters’ grief: from her father’s family, the community, the mainstream media and other actors. The book forcefully draws my attention to a significant component of toxic whiteness – its refusal to acknowledge and commemorate the griefs of minoritised peoples and respectfully accord them mainstream space in public culture.
If Amani Haydar’s memoir is a commemoration of her mother and her untimely passing before she had time to realise the many different goals and ambitions of her public and private life, it is also a gesture to her grandmother and her shocking death in the South Lebanon conflict some years earlier. Haydar’s Teta was in a civilian convoy of three vehicles travelling through the countryside to escape shelling when they are killed in an apparently inexplicable Israeli drone attack. As one of her relatives stated: ‘there was nothing around the area where we were attacked, only fruit orchards – no people and no fighters. It was an empty area… we were clearly civilians, we had white flags’ (69).
Haydar meditates on the fact that the mortalities occasioned by war can leave people with a feeling of helplessness, and the sense that there is no recourse to justice. In her work as a lawyer she had attended a workshop on the investigation of war crimes with lawyers and investigators who had worked at the Hague Convention. She found the statistics of civilian mortalities particularly disturbing; ‘In modern warfare it is estimated that eighty per cent of casualties are civilians and seventy per cent of those civilians are estimated to be women and children’ (54). The rationale of ‘acceptable collateral in military operation[s]’ (55) was equally disturbing for her, given her family history. As the only Arab in the room at the workshop she was acutely aware that her own proximity to the Israeli-Lebanese war made her uncomfortable and distressed with the approach of the workshop to this material on civilian deaths which was on occasion cheerful and even jocular (55).
Haydar’s memoir demonstrates the many ways that war intrudes into diasporic peoples’ lives, not just in professional settings like the workshop but also their private living rooms: her family received news of Haydar’s Teta’s death in a tv news report. Hearing of her mother’s violent death with no warning in this way was deeply traumatic for Haydar’s mother and other family members (61). Haydar’s memoir raises the question for me: how can space be made in the national social imaginary (beyond the significant memorials in local communities) for the commemoration of those wars from which diasporic Australians have fled? The memory of these wars already exist within the memories of individuals and collectives; how can they be recognised at the national level?
In its dual homily to her mother’s and grandmother’s untimely deaths, The Mother’s Wound forensically analyses the intertwining of gender and violence in both the settings of the private home and in warfare. It aims to record truths that often remain unrecognised and unacknowledged. This analytical and memorial work comes at a cost. Haydar describes her acute sensitivity to war and violence; even watching the normalised stream of violence on mainstream tv provokes anxiety in her. The imagery is overwhelmingly immediate, real and ‘fleshy’ (129), reminding her inescapably of ‘a heightened sense of [her] own mortality, and the mortality of those around [her]’ (129). She describes numerous occasions when journalists and other people seeking to report on and commodify the grief of Haydar’s family (on the occasions of both her mother’s and her grandmother’s egregious deaths), showed little ethical awareness of and response to Haydar’s and her sisters’ grief. These anecdotes about normalised invisibility of minoritised people’s suffering make me as a middle-class white woman very much aware of the risk Haydar exposes herself to in offering her story to a variety of readers and audiences; and of my own responsibility to try to avoid contributing to this violence and harm.
Haydar insists that in spite of their violent deaths her mother and grandmother were strong women. Although she was indisputably the victim of wrong doing her mother was not only a victim but also a courageous and loving woman, an activist who ‘fought misogyny’ (93) and who left a legacy of resilience, intelligence and helping others (254). In bearing witness to the stories of her mother and grandmother Haydar herself celebrates the spiritual resources of gratitude, faith and joy (307) which sustained her during her writing of the memoir as well as her art practice, her family, community and her activism as a survivor-advocate.
ANNE BREWSTER is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015). She is series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
August 26, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gunk Baby
by Jamie Marina Lau
Hachette
ISBN 9780733646270
Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG
Consumption and corporeality in late capitalism
A reading of Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby
After the deliquescent dream of Pink Mountain on Locust Island, Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is a wake-up call from a silent number in the small hours of the morning. Leen lives in the fictional outer suburb of Par Mars, a typical sprawl of shopping centres, housing estates, and units fronted by flat open lawns. Yet just beneath all the grass and concrete runs an undertow of surveillance and violence that feels both strange and strangely familiar.
The most remarkable (and terrifying) feature of Lau’s hyperreality is the Topic Heights shopping complex which Leen selects as the site for her new business: a healing studio where she plans to offer the traditional Chinese ear-cleaning services she has learned from her mother. Topic Heights is ‘a perfect centrum, the exact summation of every need and every personality of the people residing around its hems. Where we get our clothes, where we find things to eat, what the inside of our houses look like.’ (7) Conversant with the comforting ‘sameness’ of the shopping complex are Leen’s reflections on the mind-body relationship and her role as a healer:
I tell her I’m passionate about relieving stress and tension in physical bodies and that we often abandon the concept that our nervous system, muscles, joints and organs carry the weight of us around. So much of our soul lives in our eyes and our fingers. The rest of our body gets heavy from being a vehicle for it. It needs relief. We have to start from the nervous system, the mind. (52)
The hypnotic slide between the philosophy of Chinese medicine and anatomisation of the capitalist machinery grinding away in the bowels of Topic Heights speaks directly to the reader as body and as consumer. My initial excitement at finding myself in a setting so familiar yet so under-scrutinised in contemporary literature was gradually subsumed by a profound discomfort stemming from a growing awareness of the myriad ways in which a life might be manipulated, even choreographed, by the insidious forces of late capitalism. Like so much of the novel, however, this discomfort, as well as a certain heightened consciousness of the sensations experienced by my ‘physical body’ (grasping my phone, peering at my computer screen), felt necessary, felt like waking up after drowsing for an indeterminate period of time in a malaise of uninterrogated habits.
Leen’s liminal status as a new business owner affords her a simultaneous view of both the exterior façade and the internal workings of the Topic Heights economy. Even as she curates furniture and music for her healing studio, carefully arranging her face and her words in accordance with the tenets of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power to obtain and maintain custom, she spends her breaks luxuriating in the infinite showrooms and product ranges of K.A.G., a fictional but uncannily familiar international chain store that sells minimal basics, stationary and homewares. Leen’s own awakening is instigated by Jean-Paul, her housemate’s disgruntled co-worker at the Topic Heights’s pharmacy. Talking incessantly, Jean-Paul half-asks/half-demands that Leen drive him to a ‘discussion group’ where members of the Par Mars community use Heidegger and Hegel to dissect the managerial practices of the franchises that populate Topic Heights.
The number of men and white women who talk without listening throughout the novel underscores Leen’s relative passivity, or more accurately the practised resignation from which she observes the power plays that propel the world around her. Leen shares her narratorial detachment (or, as Lau describes it, ‘existential boredom’) with Monk, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Pink Mountain on Locust Island. But while Monk’s status as an observer is largely a function of her disempowerment as an adolescent girl, Leen’s torpor is a product of the absurdities and violence of racism. As a young woman of colour Leen is less an actor than a body to be acted on, a view frequently embodied by her male clients:
I tried to pass him a sheet. But he didn’t take it, just smiled, his breath under his pressed lips. His body lurched, tilting a bit forward, as if ready to impel himself on me. A foully carnal exhale coming from his nostrils.
‘Take,’ I said. Basic English, no emotive words.
I tried not to look where his dick was. He performed a sort of sneer and went over to the massage table, leaned up against it. He looked down. His body looked like a pouch compared to it.
‘You take,’ he said, this time using a slight accent, or perhaps I had become too paranoid at that point. He had a ten-dollar bill scrunched between his fists. ‘You take.’ (138)
Although Jean-Paul never seems to pose a similarly physical threat, occupying space with his words rather than his body, the entitlement and rage of his rants flow forth from the same arterial vein that carries the violence coursing everywhere beneath the suburban monotony of Par Mars. In an effort to bring about ‘palpable change’, Jean-Paul begins to plan and carry out a series of ‘Resisting Acts’ – strange but harmless pranks designed to unsettle any Topic Heights managerial staff who he believes are too accustomed to and comfortable in the seat of power. In this way, the violent energy that surges beneath the surface of the novel has both reactionary and revolutionary origins. Yet if the ‘late’ in late capitalism hints at the imminence of revolution, with its odd cast of misfits, Gunk Baby wonders who will be driving the revolution and where we will end up.
MEGAN CHEONG is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on Wurundjeri land. Her writing has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging and Overland.
August 19, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Monsters
by Alison Croggon
Scribe
ISBN 9781925713398
Reviewed by GAYATRI NAIR
I initially didn’t want to review this book. It is written by a white woman, and as a person of colour (POC) who wants to elevate diverse writing, I thought it was important to only review other diverse writers. However, after discussion with a mentor and writer I realised that it is also important that we, as POC women especially, participate in criticism, not just of diverse literature but also more established writers. It is possible also to challenge and change traditional criticism by introducing diverse perspectives from diverse critic-subjects. This is called auto-ethnographic criticism, which acknowledges the inextricable link between the personal and the cultural and makes room for non-traditional forms of inquiry and expression. It is a way to quietly address the assumed authority of the ‘literary review’ or the role of ‘critic’. So, in this way it’s subversive for a POC to review white authors and writing.
Alison Croggon I think would appreciate and understand this. Her work Monsters – part essay, interwoven with part memoir – interrogates her role as a white woman and how colonialism and the establishment of the empire has caused harm, not only to those outside it but those who built it. She asks difficult questions, not only of herself but of the reader.
“This figure I see in the foreground, this me. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination…grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible …” (pg 160)
Croggon is herself an immigrant, she researches her family’s heritage through murky British military history to both South Africa during the Boer War and India; her family were foot soldiers of the empire. She questions how she can escape this dynasty including spending her formative years under apartheid – and the most racist country in the world.
Croggon’s descriptive way with words and unexpected adjectives and sentence structures demonstrate her expertise as a poet. The rhythms of her writing replicate the ocean and we are sometimes dragged within its depths. The references to other writers, especially poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath are interlaced with her own criticisms in unique ways. But the stories she tells of her family life and in particular her motherhood are glittering, told with both stylistic prowess and integrity. The way she writes about being a woman, her mother and her own experience of domestic abuse which fractured her life and relationships, and her later recognition of what it was is both compassionate and unrelenting. Her refusal to be a nice woman, her anger at structures that contain women is refreshing.
The critical relationship explored in this this book though is the one with her sister, which is sometimes hard to read. Their relationship is marked by cruelty and stems from their experiences as children, the violence Croggon describes as well as the anger is at once palpable, intimate but also sometimes uncomfortable in its intimacy. Their subsequent estrangement marked by their shared inheritance of violence is traced back in a wonky line to their history as colonisers. This is not an easy read.
“When people feel there isn’t enough to go around, conflict can be vicious. Maybe that’s part of what happened between me and my sister, that sense that there was so little of everything. There wasn’t enough money, there wasn’t enough love. Everything turned into a deadly competition. And we both lost.” (pg 154)
The book asks questions, but it doesn’t give answers. As a reader this can sometimes be frustrating as we are dragged along, it can feel relentless, and it’s unclear what Croggon wants from us as the reader. But there is also an understanding that the reader can accept that life doesn’t have neat conclusions and we can sit with her in trying to make sense of it.
Croggon’s critique of colonialism, which threads its way through the entire book, is her most interesting but also at times jarring. She traces a faint line through her lineage as colonisers and their cruelty to her family’s recent experiences of violence which led to both the fracture in her parents’ relationship and her relationship with her sister. She investigates the idea that like patriarchy hurts everyone (including men), white supremacy also hurts white people. Not only does it hurt those that are colonised, but it also hurts those that perpetrate it. Croggon explains:
“I’m not interested in writing a mea culpa. I’m not interested in throwing ashes on my head and throwing myself on the ground in penitence. I’m not interested in displays of my guilt or my culpability. Take this as read: I was raised in a racist, sexist, hierarchical culture, and just as I had to learn (am still learning) how to undo all the prohibitions imposed by the patriarchs, rows and rows of them in their robes like in medieval paintings, leading all the up to the Throne of God, so I am learning to unlearn racism.” (pg 241)
Whilst this is a novel and valid theory that deserves to be interrogated further, one of the problems with this assertion is that too much focus is on the white experience and not enough on the experiences of those who were oppressed. To her credit Croggon acknowledges this but some of it does feel a bit self-pitying and has elements of white saviour complex. Whilst it is a memoir and this self-reflection is important, there is perhaps too much focus on this narrative when she could have further amplified the stories of the oppressed. She does refer to other Black and brown thinkers like Audre Lorde and Ruby Hamad, but it also feels like a checklist in a post #blacklivesmatter world. This narrative takes away from the stories that need to be told.
Her descriptions and unravelling of the misogynies in canonical works are sharp. And the way she uses theory to unpack her own personal history whilst at times raw is also compelling. Croggon’s use of the English language is superb. Her condemnation of the empire, its inheritance and how it’s destroyed not only external, but her inner world is both uneasy and powerful.
“I was born as part of a monstruous structure – the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped, me that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.” (pg 160)
“Those voiceless ghosts, only audible in their absence.” (pg 35) By writing her own story, and asking these questions, she gives those ghosts a voice and encourages other stories by those that have been oppressed, to be told. In Monsters, Croggon also makes space for these questions to be answered.
GAYATRI NAIR is an Indian-Australian writer, poet and DJ based on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney’s inner west. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and has qualifications in Law and Arts, working in human rights policy, research and advocacy. Gayatri has been published in Sweatshop Women and Swampland Magazine.
August 19, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Against Certain Capture
by Miriam Wei Wei Lo
Apothecary Archive
ISBN: 978-0-6488079-7-1
Reviewed by JACKSON
The interestingly eccentric Apothecary Archive recently re-issued Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s collection, Against Certain Capture, which won the 2004 WA Premier’s Book Award for Poetry.
Like many Australian citizens, Lo has a complicated background. She was born in Canada and grew up in Singapore. She has Chinese-Malaysian and Anglo-Australian parents (Lo, About), and their meeting is part of the story of this book, which presents two parallel biographies, one of her Chinese paternal grandmother 梁月仙 (Liáng Yuè Xiān) and one of her Australian grandmother Eva Sounness.
While a prose biography may be lengthy and detailed, a successful verse biography is like a good biopic: it showcases the pivotal events, allowing the reader to extrapolate the story and its significance. Against Certain Capture adopts this approach, offering 21 shortish poems, devoting half to each grandmother. Within their brevity, Lo lucidly evokes these women’s characters and times.
She does so by subtly deploying poetic craft. The life of 梁月仙 amid the scrabble and crush of twentieth-century China and Malaysia, choosing romance over money and giving birth to Lo’s father in a narrow room above a shop (Lo, Home), is given quick-stepping lines, free-flowing, fast-changing stanzas, and fragments of Chinese. A striking example is “Run”, which appears on the page in three narrow columns, suggesting not only the young woman’s literal and metaphorical journey but also the vertical presentation of traditional Chinese poetry. It opens:
Sometimes life
narrows down
to this
a path
cut shoulder-wide
into grass
two feet
that run
between the
rubber trees
on this
five acres
梁月仙
you hold
your name
and run
Through Lo’s skill with phrase and pattern, we feel the young woman clinging to her cultural identity while labouring for her family’s survival (“the coffeeshop / bankrupt”).
In contrast to 梁月仙, Sounness raised ten children in the dry, expansive Australian rural landscape. Accordingly, her section tends toward slower, prosier lines and more regular stanza patterns. Assessing the farmer she would marry,
she notes that his arms are steady, although his dancing
leaves something to be desired. As they move, she weights
his soberness against bandy legs, his shuffling
two-step, the smell of the farm on his collar. She sways.
(“Saturday Night Dances”)
These examples illustrate how throughout this book the style serves the subject matter. There are no egregious verbal gymnastics. As Andrew Burke comments, Lo’s “diction is so unobtrusive you never notice the words — just what they’re saying”. After all,
There are no pretty words
for hunger.
Only a thin white dribble
squeezed from a cracked nipple,
(“No Pretty Words”)
and dignified maturity deserves understated metaphor:
Eva rises, drawing her years about her —
a cloak of thick and silvering hair
that hangs past her shoulders.
(“Silver”)
Refreshingly, this book is written in the third person. This enhances the sense of intermittently peeking at the two families’ lives as if through a camera. Elsewhere, Lo remarks that she likes “experimenting with aesthetic distance. The practice of Keats’ negative capability … of writing without drawing attention to oneself … was in the back of my mind” (Brennan, Interview).
Sounness, especially, is seen from a distance. In an essay, Lo compares the experiences of researching and writing the two lives. She says writing about Sounness was much more challenging although — and maybe because — she was still alive and Lo interviewed her instead of replying solely upon others’ narratives. This made creating a coherent story more difficult (Lo, “Reconfiguring” 205–207). Perhaps as a result, the Sounness work tends, for me, to be less successful. In particular, there is a good deal of quoted speech which, although Lo handles it skilfully, appears to have been somewhat resistant to rendering in verse. These lines do not ring in my mind after reading like the ones in Lo’s own voice.
Nevertheless, the poems memorably capture the tone of Sounness’s life. Michael Brennan comments that through her poems, Lo “explores family histories with openness, sincerity and a gift for characterisation, giving detail and depth to the conflicts and prejudice, nurturing and love, of the strong women of her family.” He calls Against Certain Capture “an adroit sequence of poems” in which “Lo’s formidable grandmothers … are vividly present” (Miriam). Intriguingly, no-one ever describes a man as “formidable”. Lo herself comments, “I wrote about my grandmothers partly because we live in a world that does not take old ladies very seriously, when I feel that they ought to be taken very seriously indeed” (Brennan, Interview).
Sounness’s recollections are taken especially seriously in “Between a Mother and her Mongol Child”, which juxtaposes the book’s only foray into mid-line whitespace and chopped-up syntax (“connectthe wiring start / the stop heart startstop / the stopheart”) with a passage from Sounness’s journal (“It took some time before the Mongol became a child”) to vividly express Sounness’s conflicting feelings about raising a child with Down syndrome.
I hope that dated term “Mongol” makes you squirm as I did upon encountering it quoted by a person with Chinese heritage. One reason we read poems is to examine ourselves. As Brennan notes, Lo’s work highlights the “ethnic, cultural and political divisions and contradictions from which contemporary Australian identity evolves, as well as a vital and realistic picture of how the minutiae of culture and identity reshape us over generations” (Miriam).
I would add that the reason Lo’s poems do this so well is because she chooses not to delineate her sociopolitical concerns explicitly. Hence, readers are free to experience her work on multiple levels, see its connections for themselves, and draw their own conclusions.
Lo herself comments on this. Discussing poets she terms “hybrid” or “multi-racial” whose work she read as background, she says:
I was also bothered by a general obsession with alienation and the way in which the poetry seemed to become a repetitive performance of various poets’ marginal credentials. I wanted to write something that emphasised not only the relational and communal context of experiences of cultural difference, but also the positive possibilities of hybridity as a mode of being that does not have to be characterised primarily by alienation. (Brennan, Interview)
Perhaps the most important reason Lo writes about her grandmothers is to articulate her personal definition of hybridity, a theoretical term she seems to find apposite, but also uncomfortable because of its “dark linguistic history” (Lo, “Towards” 9–10). To be able to use it, she defines it as seeing oneself as a collection of cultural “parts” in “relationship with each other”. She comments that these “parts” are shaped by familial and historical “factors” and that by writing about her grandmothers, she is attempting to create a “positive” view of hybridity without forgetting how it is affected by prejudiced discourses (“Towards ” 13–14).
One way to do this is through language. The 梁月仙 poems, like Lo, use English as their first language and Chinese as a second (Lo, Home; Brennan, Interview). Because of their appearance and sound, the Chinese fragments significantly enhance the poems’ atmosphere. Lo explains that using Mandarin helped her get inside her grandmother’s head and milieu (Lo, “Towards” 16). It helps the reader, too:
花样的年华,
来如春梦不多时,
去似秋云无觅处。
(“Like the Autumn Clouds, They Are Gone”)
Um … something about flowers and years? I turn to Google, which translates the first line idiomatically as “In the mood for love”, adding wistful romance to Lo’s English version, which beautifully preserves the poetry:
Like flowers, the days of my youth —
they came like the sweet breath of spring
in my dreams, like the autumn clouds
they are gone where they cannot be found.
As Burke observes, this 32-page book is large “in intention and scope”. On finishing it, I felt a little short-changed! I wished I could learn more about the grandmothers’ fascinating lives.
I would also have liked more of the poetry to savour. As Lo herself remarks, “Poetry has to be about pleasure (poetry for its own sake) and it will be relevant and valuable as long as some of us enjoy reading and writing it” (Brennan, Interview). I have certainly enjoyed reading and contemplating this book.
References
Brennan, Michael. Interview with Miriam Wei Wei Lo. July 2011, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/cou_article/19021/Interview-with-Miriam-Wei-Wei-Lo/en/tile.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. Sept. 2009, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/14885/Miriam-Wei-Wei-Lo/en/tile.
Burke, Andrew. Miriam Lo’s ’Against Certain Capture’. Sept. 2004, https://hispirits.blogspot.com/2004/09/miriam-los-against-certain-capture.html.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. About. 2021, https://miriamweiweilo.com/.
“Home” FAQ. 2021, https://miriamweiweilo.com/home-faq.
“Reconfiguring a Necessary Entrapment : A Tale of Two Grandmothers.” Beyond Good and Evil? : Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region, edited by Dennis Haskell et al., University of Western Australia Press for the Westerly Centre, 2005, pp. 199–209.
“Towards a Particular Hybridity: A Beginning.” Westerly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1999, pp. 9–20, https://westerlymag.com.au//wp-content/uploads/2016/02/WesterlyVol.44no.4.pdf.
JACKSON was born in Cumbria, England, and lives in Australia and New Zealand. Her four full-length poetry collections include A coat of ashes (Recent Work Press 2019) and The emptied bridge (Mulla Mulla Press 2019). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, notably the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. Her awards include the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. In 2018 she completed her PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University, winning the University Research Medal and two other awards. During 2018 and 2019 she taught English in China. She works as a poetry editor and casual academic. thepoetjackson.com