Nabina Das

Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between USA and India. Her short stories have been published in Inner Voices, a contest-winning collection of fiction (Mirage Books, India), and The Cartier Street Review. A 2nd prize winner of an all-India Poetry Contest organized by HarperCollins-India and Open Space, her poems appear in Quay, Pirene’s Fountain, Shalla Magazine, Kritya, The Toronto Quarterly, The Cartier Street Review, Maintenant 3 (Three Rooms Press), Muse India, Danse Macabre, The Smoking Book anthology, Liberated Muse anthology, Mad Swirl and elsewhere. A poetry commentary and a poetry book review also appear in Kritya and The Cartier Street Review respectively. A 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference, Nabina was Assistant Metro Editor with The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and has worked as a journalist and media person in India for about 10 years in places as diverse as Tehelka.com, Down To Earth environmental magazine, Confederation of Indian Industries, National Foundation for India and The Sentinel newspaper. She has published several articles, commentaries and essays during her tenures. An M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her other interests are theater and music. Formally trained in India classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. She blogs at www.fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com and freelances when not writing.

 

 

Aleph

The first sound uttered is always forgotten
Possibly it is never even a word. Just
An interjection that derives from faraway
Fears or an anxious rhythm of speech.
The first sound can be heard quite clear
When groans and grunts are taken care
Of with mighty sweep of authorized
Hands that also stifle songs and smiles.
If you were a baby or a doddering pair
Of legs, your first word would be despair
Not a calligrapher’s delight in dusky ink
Blinking away in the heliotrope night.

In one little fable the first letter was
Meant to be the first word of wonder
But no one wrote it down and so later
The ocean took it with fish and dead matter.

 

 

Living Room Homily

Women talking in high voice
Tingling streets
An indolent afternoon in the library
– All that glides up to whisper:
How we love life

After poems are read
Blood is spilled
Bee stings are removed
From unresponsive arms

We can measure up to reality
As though it’s a challenge
We can read minds
As though it’s an ancient art, revived

Furry dogs bustling
Smothering fleur du soir
A fleeting glance after remembrance
– Nothing that stops enchantment,
To say we love life

After you come back home
Hobble in the pantry
After newsprint withers
Becomes compost in the bin

I can clamour under the bright light
Straighten my pleats and scarf
I can wake up before dawn
As though night never came.

Mario Licon Cabrera translates poems by Michael Brennan

 

Mario Licón Cabrera (México, 1949) has lived in Sydney since 1992. His third collection of poetry, La Reverberación de la Ceniza was publshed by Mora & Cantúa Editores in 2005. His work features in an architecture and poetry installation, Metaphors of Space, at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has translated the poetry of Dorothy Porter, Judith Beveridge, Peter Boyle, J.S. Harry, Robert Adamson, amongst other Australian poets, into Spanish. His collection, Yuxtas, a bilingual collection (Spanish/English), written with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts/Literature Board. These poems are selected translations from Michael Brennan’s latest collection, Unanimous Night, which is short-listed in the NSW Premier’s Literary Award.

 

Carta a casa /2
 
Llegó Noviembre.
Meses más cáldos en gestación,
bandejas con tuberculos a la vista, tulipanes,
azafrán, lirios, robustas y doradas ofrendas
limpias de la negra tierra del norte,
nombres tan brillantes y extraños como un rezo:
Azul Delft, Juana de Arco, Remembranza,
nombres, los misterios ordinaries,
La señora de John T. Scheepers, Groenlandia,
Perico negrot, El récord del portero,
cada quien a la espera de ásperas manos
para regresarlos a la tierra oscura,
para ser enterrados
en paciente incertidumbre,
y esperar
hasta el fin del invierno.

Letter home

November already.
Warmer months finding form,
trays of bulbs laid out, tulips, crocus,
lilies, fat and golden offerings
brushed clean of black northern earth,
names bright and strange as prayer :
Delft Blue, Jeanne d’Arc, Remembrance,
names, the ordinary mysteries,
Mrs John T. Scheepers, Groenland,
Black Parrot, Doorman’s Record,
each waiting for weathered hands
to give them back to blind earth,
to bury them
in patient unknowing,
and wait
until winter’s end.

 

Carta a casa /3
 
Debo decirles, que no hay nada como el hogar.
Ninguno de ellos piensa que soy un forastero.
Me reciben en sus casas con manos
toscas y me brindan deliciosos manjares.
Después de cada comida, ellos frotan mis cejas
y mi barba, y secan las lágrimas
que por meses han corrido por mis mejillas
al viajar de pueblo en pueblo.
Me dicen que ellos son forasteros aquí,
y en la fresca atmósfera nocturna
cuelgan sus palabras por tal cosa,
entre la suava caricia de la barba
y los tiernos ojos del más viejo de ellos.
Me dicen que pronto me dejaran,
pro que en su ausencia debo seguir con los banquetes
que alguien vendrá y yo debo recibirlo,
no debo hablar de más, pero sí alimentar al invitado
y después secar sus lágrimas. Antes de irme debo decirle
que está en su casa, que él aquí no es un forastero.
Ellos dicen, ninguno de estos es forastero.
Ellos dicen, que esperaran por mí en el próximo pueblo
con sus manos gentiles y sus alegres ojos,
que el tren me llevará allá, y en el camino
podré escuchar el llanto del hombre viejo
y dejar a la tierna noche tocar mi rostro,
podré recordar los manjares caseros,
y esperar a que el silencio tenga lo suyo.
Dicen, cuando nos encontremos en el próximo pueblo,
ellos me lo explicaran todo. bare

Letter home

I should tell you, it’s nothing like home.
Not one of them thinks of me as a stranger.
They welcome me to their houses with rough
hands and feed me delicious feasts.
After each meal, they stroke my eyebrows
and beard, and dry the tears
that have run down my cheeks over months
travelling from town to town.
They tell me they are stranger here,
hanging their word for such things
in the cool night air, between the beard-stroking
and the young eyes of the oldest among them.
They say soon they will leave me,
but I am to keep feasting in their absence,
that someone will come and I must invite him in,
I must not say too much, but feed him and afterwards
dry his tears. Before I leave, I must tell him
this is his home now, that he is no stranger here.
They say, none of this is strange.
They say, they will wait for me in the next town
with their gentle hands and playful eyes,
that the train will take me there, and on the way
I can listen to the old man’s crying
and let the lightness of night find my face,
I can remember the feasts from home,
and wait for silence to have its fill.
They tell me, when we meet in the next town,
they will explain it all.

 

Carta a casa /4
 
Estás cerca,
tu aliento agitándose
entre los cedres
de ochocientos años de edad,
piedras
erosionadas
por cosas invisibles,
particulas de arena
y rocas,
flotantes
en la brisa,
la insignificancia
definiéndolo todo,
aquí donde un poeta
observó
nada
más
que el paso
de una estación,
y el aire otoñal
entibiando
el aliento,
y así
continuamos
nuestro ascenso lento,
un millar y
cuatrocientos
cincuenta escalones 
tallados en piedra
de esta montaña,
erigiéndose,
nombrando el templo
donde nos sentamos.
La vista,
el valle
que emerge,
hojas castañs
dadas
a un frío filoso y quemante,
el verde profundo
de los árboles añejos
en total quietud,
la brisaa ancestral
ahora corriendo veloz,
invisible y suave
a través de las piedras
suave a través
de la superficie
de nuestros ojos,
partículas
invisibles
interminablemente
borrando
cada
cosa.



Letter Home

You are close,
breath drawing
fast amongst
eight hundred
year old cedars,
stones
weathered bare
by invisible things,
specks of sand
and rock,
carried
on the breeze,
insignificance
shaping everything,
here where a poet
noted
nothing
more
than a season
passing
and autumn air
warmed
on breath
and so
we continue
our slow ascent
one thousand
four hundred
and fifty steps
of stone hewn
from this
mountain
rising
naming
the temple
where we sit
the view
the valley
appearing now
russet leaves
given
to a sharp cold fire
the deep green
of ancient trees
holding still,
the ancient breeze
running fast now
smooth and invisible
across stones,
smooth across
the surfaces
of our eyes,
invisible  
flecks
endlessly
erasing 
each
thing.

 

Carta a casa /6
 
La primavera empiiza su lento striptease.
La gente con menos ropa cada día.
 
Los pesados abriigos de lana dan paso al algodón,
a las líneas curvas de caderas, pechos y nalgas.
 
Escucho la música que me enseñaste,
esa que se ubica lentamente entre cada cosa.
 
Esas palabras extrañas –Gentileza, amistad,
afecto –todavía más extrañas al decirlas
 
en la lengua que se habla aquí.
Sentado percibo el oleaje de la gente,
 
a ratos saboreándolo con una sonrisa
o con el trunco lenguaje
 
que estoy aprendiendo, confíanza
y gentileza hablan por todas partes,
 
Atento escucho expresiones de mi país
transformándose en otro lenguaje
 
entre amigos conversando
amontonados, la percusión suave
 
de una pareja joven, protejiéndose
del crudo ambiente invernal.
 
Desplazo mis dedos a lo largo de palabras
como si cada palabra fuera una plegaria.

Letter Home

Spring starts its slow striptease.
Each day people are wearing less,

thick woollen coats give way to cotton,
irmer lines of hips, buttocks and breasts.

I listen for the music you taught me,
one that settles slowly between each thing.

Those strange words — kindness, friendship,
care — stranger  still  spoken

in the language spoken here.
I sit sensing the tide of people,

sometimes testing it with a smile
or with the broken language

I’m learning, trust
kindness speaks anywhere.

I listen carefully to idioms of home
rising in another language

between friends huddled 
in conversation, the gentle percussion

of a young couple sheltering
from late winter air.

I run my finger along words
as if each word was a prayer.

 

Adam Aitken interviews Alvin Pang and John Kinsella

Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia

Edited by John Kinsella and Alvin Pang,

Ethos Books (2008) / 324 pages / SGD 35.00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Readers looking for cross-literary collaboration between Singapore and Australia will find Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia, a valuable addition to their poetry library. How do we name and represent the other? What does it mean to poeticise other cultures whose territories are not necessarily close enough for us to identify with?  Or is it perfectly  satisfying to find a common humanity that crosses national boundaries?  Over There provides answers to all these questions and more. With a growing sense of the need to understand our Asian neighbours in a deep way that goes beyond touristic stereotypes, I was pleased to discover that there existed a collection that brought together the poetries of Singapore and Australia. I was hoping to find that cultural differences between Australia and Singapore produce a synergy between two poetries, and for me, this collection stimulates thinking about how national literary canons construct and defend certain perceptions of nationhood and racial/ethnic identity in an era of globalisation and cross-border desemination. If the local is global and vice versa, how does the poetry in this volume transcend the particular provincialisms of our respective literary worlds? What does it mean in to be an “Australian” or a “Singaporean” poet? What does it mean to be nomadic in the era of globalised cultural exchange?

 

I was moved to engage with this anthology (and to defend its existence) after reading a rather critical review of the collection in a recent issue of Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore (QLRS). Reviewer Gwee Li Sui was hoping that the collaboration between editors Kinsella and Pang could “succeed on at least a level of an envisioned dialogue between spaces which, as both admit, need to communicate more deeply. Its nation-building value is also flaunted through the editorial reminder in the introduction that such work will become key documents as "political desire in both Australia and Singapore to constitute nation as ‘history’ increases" ("Beyond Colloquial Prowess," QLRS, Vol. 7, No. 8 2008).

 

Gwee was disappointed with the anthology for a number of reasons, though not because of the quality of the poets and poems, but in the main by the collection’s perceived lack of coherence:

 

Stripped of an overt chronology, we meet an intriguingly dominant sameness… the Singaporeans almost all write striking grammatical poetry that does not inhere essences and is linguistically more conservative than its counterpart. The two competent halves are bridged by not one, as the contents page wants to suggest, but two Australians raised in Singapore: Miriam Wei Wei Lo and the supple Boey Kim Cheng.

 

His main complaint was the anthology’s  

lack of ground for actual comparison, considering that similarities are what the editors manifestly claim. I’m not advocating that multiculturalism be its subject matter, but one is precisely left guessing whether it is meant to be. The Australian section certainly lets culture actively modify the rhythm, sensibilities, and use of English in a way that then leaves the Singaporean section, in the manner it is edited, look vastly monocultural. (personal correspondence,1 September 2008)

 

Gwee’s review concludes that there really needs to be two volumes of verse as there is no unifying factor to bring them together: “[h]ere exists no unifying subject except the selections’ mere framing beside each other, what now seems to be all the title means.” In other words, according to Gwee, the volume does not really give the reader any idea how the two territories intersect, or how the gap between two separate nationalisms is bridged:

 

Multiculturalism may have been a feature through which the two could provoke ideas about how far their national identities actually intersected, but this was left unevenly pursued…. So the two editors keep to their own aesthetic beliefs, administer their own domains, and leave unshaken the internal relationship of their own national poetry.

 

Alvin Pang and John Kinsella have clarified some of the issues aired in the QLRS review. Their key aim was to deterritorialise their respective literary spaces. Deterritorialisation – or what Kinsella calls the “un-nationing” function of poetry – is surely crucial. By conjoining two national selections into one the editors hoped to a) break down the protectionism in the English language, even amongst the English-speaking nations; b) create more interaction between two countries with strong bonds, interactions, shared history – but spaces need to communicate more deeply; and c) show that the poets of both territories have something to say about each other.

 

But rather than deconstruct the boundary, does the method of merely juxtaposing two selections confirm national differences? Kinsella explains his project is a kind of literary activism:

 

I am anti-nation but pro-communities… poetry is a community of sorts – or crossings of communities. There’s a language that evolves that crosses all languages. That interests me. Presenting such a ‘cross-section’ of Australian poetry, from all over the landmass, from different cultural spaces, and juxtaposing it against the work of another ‘nation’ immediately alters the perception of ‘Australianity’ in itself. Australia is no greater place than Singapore because of its size and eco power, any more than the US  is greater than Australia etc. My intentions behind the anthology were to alter the co-ordinates of investigation and context re: these factors.  (personal correspondence, 15 August 2008)

 

Certainly, cross-literary exchange between the countries has been sparse in recent times. It is disappointing to realise that with the exception of major Singaporean poets like Edwin Thumboo and Cyril Wong most rarely appear in Australian journals, while none of Kinsella’s selection made first appearance in a Singaporean journal. If both Singapore and Australia are both marginal to centres of world influence – if both are islands speaking from margin to centre – a greater collaboration will help poets gain a cross border readership. This result would, in the end, pay far more dividends than the outmoded framework of national literatures.

 

One would expect that while Australia and Singapore share a colonial legacy, our respective poetries would speak more often to each other. But both editors share a common resistance to the blanket term postcolonial, and their collection shows that no existing terminology quite sums up the similarities and differences in the two post-British colonies. Both were after all very different kinds of colonies, with the dominant population in Singapore being Straits Chinese, while that of Australian was for almost a century Anglo-Celtic, and then Anglo-European following post-war migration.

 

The editors stress important commonalities, for example the ‘commingling of ancient and immigrant cultures’. Kinsella has selected Australian poets for whom indigeneity connects modernity with the ancient, and for Pang’s Singaporeans express a sense of “ancient times”, a historical foundation for the intersection of Malay, Indian, and Chinese histories. While it is clear that both Singapore and Australian are immigrant cultures, it is interesting to compare disparate narratives of the ancient through the collection. I found that whereas the idea of an ancient pre-colonial culture and influence is part of the literary territory of Australia’s Indigenous poets like Lionel Fogarty and Charmaine Papertalk Green (and also for the indigeno/ethnopoetics of Peter Minter) for Singaporean poets, ancestral links in southern mainland China figure prominently. There were 12 mentions of grandparents and 30 or so mentions of China and Chinese in the poems. Malay or Malaysia was mentioned 18 times.

 

Of particular relevance to shared heritage was the Australian poetry of John Mateer who provides a textual  and affective bridge to Singapore, where the visiting poet feels a sense of filiality and nomadic connection or brotherhood with one of the city-state’s ethnic Malay residents. Singaporean/Australian Miriam Lo is another sensitive conduit, a poet who was born in Singapore and who has made Western Australia her permanent home. Another is Boey Kim Cheng, editor of this journal, who now lives and works at the University of Newscastle.

 

So does this anthology succeed in creating a resistance to a poetics of “mono-history”, where myths of nationhood dominate freer, or perhaps more hybridised imaginaries? Are poets from both sides constrained by borders, and write as outsiders looking in, or is there a greater mixing going on? What follows is an edited transcript of my interview with John Kinsella and Alvin Pang.

 

 

AA

I have a question that focuses on the differences between your editorial policies and John Kinsella’s. QLRS reviewer Gwee Li Sui wrote that John deliberately omitted the “visitor genre" while you were happy to include poems about travel. Gwee wrote:

 

The two editors have not communicated well, and it shows: although John Mateer’s poems are generously all about the island-state, Kinsella declares that his own general principle is to exclude writings belonging to what he calls the "visit" genre. Yet, Pang blissfully includes such pieces, as his entries for Kirpal Singh, Colin Tan, and Yong Shu Hoong show, and even extends the space to Singaporean adventures in all parts of the globe.Do I understand this correctly? Which Australian poets wrote about Singapore or Malaysia in a way that wasn’t touristic?

 

AP

Well John and I selected our own territories completely independently, actually.  So we had different priorities. Nevertheless, the Australian section selected by John had John Mateer and Ouyang Yu writing about Singapore based on their travels here recently.  And Miriam Wei Wei Lo (improbable odds: we went to school together in Singapore and were active together in the Creative Writing Club!) writes about one of her visits as well.

 

I’d say Miriam’s deconstructs very nicely the notion of "visiting" since Singapore is both her home and not; she gets mistaken for a tourist etc etc.  Ouyang takes a potshot at cultural representation and mistranslation, and Mateer riffs off on his own in a piece that almost has little to do with physical Singapore itself!

 

AA

But why did the reviewer say John had rejected the "visitor genre"? It sounds like the visitor genre is well represented.

 

AP

I think the reviewer missed the point actually.  As JK himself argues, this ISN’T a book of "Singaporean poets about Australia; Aussie poets about Singapore". There just happen to be some poems that cross over, as almost inevitably there would be.

 

And indeed, where it has occurred, the poets/poems are (rightly) interrogating larger issues of identity, power, and cultural negotiation that go way beyond the territories that happen to be represented. That such frisson has occurred in poetry between Singapore and Australia is to me nothing to be apologetic about — simply means there are things we can reveal to each other, about ourselves.

 

AA

How does the anthology interrogate issues of identity, power and cultural negotiation?

 

AP

The short answer from me (JK would have his own view) would be thus:

 

Few or no cross-territorial anthologies of this kind agree, which has always puzzled me. There are unspoken boundaries (including the book trade cartel and other economic and political barriers) that fence literary communities.  This book is an attempt to bridge those glaring gaps, between two relatively neighbouring communities that (1) both use English as a functioning as well as literary language, for what that is worth; (2) have various sorts of ties and a more or less equal level of affluence — that means that we stand in a certain economic relation to each other as peers and partners, in trade, education, emigration etc.; (3) we are also starting to have an influence on each other as bodies of writing — perhaps one direction more than the other — but to a degree that bears further conversation.

 

Both territories are grappling with identity and cultural issues, albeit different ones, with different agendas and starting points and outcomes. I was thinking that as we look at ourselves, through poetry, that we might have things to say of relevance to our counterparts. But really it is allowing the works to stand and spark rather than directing the fireworks. That in itself I think stands in defiance of a certain type of more didactic, directive publication.

 

There is a "nationalising" imperative going on in both territories that I think bear resistance.  Singaporean writers are almost obsessed with it to the point of refusing to contribute to the national discourse head-on. To my mind, our writing at least in my generation has taken on the "small is large" paradigm – reclaiming the personal (sex, language, religion etc) that has been colonised politically. This is expressed in so many different ways throughout the book.

 

The other point I’d like to make is that for a group of Singapore poets (or poets from/in Singapore) to even make a claim to stand and hold their own in an anthology of this nature is itself a deeply audacious assertion. It challenges preconceived notions about literature and publishing in English, and about what sorts/sources of writing are supposed to go together, for example.

 

We’ve also spoken before about the absurd lack of literary traffic across the Pacific and how it has to do with the way the book trade is organised. Well, this is the sort of writing that these insidious fences have been keeping apart.

 

I wonder, John, if Gwee, as a sympathetic and informed scholar, might have missed the whole point of the audacity of putting these two bodies of work together in one book 🙂

 

JK

As an anarchist (vegan pacifist) I, of course, perceive what has been done as an un-nationing, an unbuilding of nation. The process of decontextualising out of Australian mythologies of canon and self-perception (on a nation-making level – esp re govt versions of, and lit official versions of…), of juxtaposition, change the reading habit and consequently undoes things, at least in part. Presenting such a ‘cross-section’ of Australian poetry, from all over the landmass, from different cultural spaces, and juxtaposing it against the work of another ‘nation’ immediately alters the perception of ‘Australianity’ in itself. Australia is no greater place than Singapore because of its size and eco power, any more than the US greater than Australia etc. my intentions behind the anthology were to alter the co-ordinates of investigation and context re these factors. Yes, it does leave the book open to criticism re what you say, but dialogues have to begin somewhere. Just placing the work side-by-side, and having it read in that context, alters the statute of limitations that sadly guides the reading of ‘national poetries’. Still, there is much further to go…

 

AA 

Clearly, John’s own poem in this anthology breaks down canons by directly addressing Singapore’s controversial approach to crime and punishment. It’s anyone right to question injustice, whether that’s happening in your own country or not.

 

AP

Yes, John’s sequence is nominally “about” the death penalty and its application to the Vietnamese drug trafficker in Singapore but really goes beyond the specific case that sparked it off.

 

AA

And how are Singaporean poets taking on Australia?

 

AP

Yong Shu Hoong’s “Adelaide” isn’t really about Adelaide at all but addresses (among other things) the Chinese cultural diaspora and its impact on the evolution of language; dialect and the way it (echo) locates itself and its users; family and an almost genetic (or mimetic?) sense of self that goes beyond political or even linguistic borders.

 

Chinese-Australian Ouyang Yu’s two “Kingsbury Tales” are nominally set in Singapore but really, deconstruct English/language and its contemporary twists, the value-systems of diaspora etc.

 

And Miriam Lo of course. I should add the story of how her mother made her promise never to read the poems included in Singapore (for fear of arrest!)

 

AA

I like that: a poem about Adelaide that’s not really about Adelaide! Only a non-Adelaidean could do that ;=). It’s interesting that Miriam’s mother read her poems as subversive. I had not read them as subversive at all, but now that I know this, I can read them that way.

 

AP

Actually we’ve moved on… they’d no doubt be taken as subversive not all that long ago just on twitch reflex coz of mention of politicians’ names…  these days this sort of thing is nothing special…which is another kind of interrogation I suppose.

 

AA

In what ways are the poets gathered in your anthology resisting the old nationalisms that have come to define notions of "Singaporean literature, and "Australian Literature"?

 

AP

For some Singapore writers such as Edwin Thumboo, their selections in the book represent significant (and welcome) departures from the canon of work which has defined them in the past, and it’s just begging for a re-examination of their entire oeuvre and contribution.  Not to mention that the poems themselves deconstruct the poets’ own earlier positions.

 

Singapore writing as it is known outside Singapore has been really narrowly defined for the past few decades.  As with all my anthologies, I’ve attempted to broaden the sense of play and expand the known palette of what’s available in contemporary poetry.

 

Also, with so many expatriate/trans-territorial writers, what does it even mean to be a Singaporean poet? Plenty of interesting exceptions and questions arise. The poets included in the anthology include some teaching/working/living abroad (not just in Australia), for instance. 

 

The concerns that Singapore poets take on have also changed – I’d argue that we are writing a self-consciously un-nationalistic writing in reaction to previous imperatives at the same time that many writers are re-claiming spaces that have hitherto been annexed, really, by political discourse. They/we are writing "between the country / that will not remember our love / and the sea", to quote Cyril Wong.

 

AA

In relation to questions of form, use of language, style and register, are their synergies between the two literatures? What are the crossovers? I am thinking of issues to do with the vernacular, the demotic, and the ceremonial/vatic registers of language.

 

AP

I think there is a fair variety represented, including some use of the vernacular.  I don’t think the two literatures converge in any narrow or easy way, however, and I’m not sure that is a bad thing.

 

AA

Today I heard Lee Kwan Yew say on Bloomberg or BBC World: "Singapore is cool". In the context of recent upsurges in nationalism over the Olympic torch relay, LKY was comparing Singapore’s advantage as a country that had learned to play the Westerner’s game, while the PRC had not learned to play the game, and therefore lacked a sense of how to deal with "the West". 

 

The question is: is Singapore poetry "cool" in the sense LKY expresses: because it takes on the West with all the latest intelligence, organisation, and technology?

 

AP

Actually that is precisely the sort of appropriation that I think our best writing resists.  And it shows just how insidious the whole enterprise is — how creativity has become cultural manufacture; the arts have been appropriated as industrial design, authenticity and identity yoked in service of tourism.

 

It’s also a bit of a trap statement/question to address, because it is not as if one should completely write off "the West with all the latest technology" in poetry.  That’s not the point at all.  I think the real question is, who decides what is "cool" and why is it important to be "cool" in a particular way?   And when our poetry does something, is it doing so in service of the "cool" or to other agendas that have not been acknowledged or given their own separate or even opposing validities?

 

It’s so funny, though, to hear LKY adopting the idiom of the "cool" just to help sell us.  He, of all people!   Then again, he’s also speaking as the former leader of a tiny nation-state which (a) always had artificial and somewhat arbitrary borders (b) always had to adopt a certain position of subservience, to "play another’s game" just to get by. China doesn’t really have to in the long term.

 

If your point then is whether Singapore poetry can break free of the geopolitical constraints of Singapore the country/territory?  I’d argue it is one of the few things that can, should, has, will and no apologies about it. Not even about breaking free, but alternative definition. About re-imagining. About acknowledging a different sense of "country" and "land" and "people" and "history" that has nothing to do with 1965 and the flag.

 

Caveat re: what I said: of course, varying degrees of success or intent are at play. Mileage may vary, agendas differ.

 

AA

Alvin, returning to Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s work and the question of national allegiances/resistances, I feel that she sums up the conditionality of being both Australian and Singaporean. It seems that yes, inserting the word "national" in front of  "poet" does not interperpolate the migrant’s identity any more. She writes

 

caught between sinking and swimming,

as I am caught now. As if rhetoric mattered.

As if this place gives me a name for myself.

 

Which leads me to ask: this feeling she expresses of being "caught between’, neither here nor there; or perhaps caught in language and the rhetoric of identity. Do you identify this a perpetual theme in contemporary Singapore poetry or have the locals really found their home though an identification with a singular, or essentialised identity?

 

AP

I’d say absolutely NOT "an identification with a singular, or essentialised identity", inasmuch as such a construction is identified with the rhetoric of the political establishment. Quite fiercely an anti-identification actually, a "this is not who I am" rather than a firm "this is me" one way or another.

 

Some writers no doubt experience that as a kind of imbalance and ambivalence.  Others may well assert an alternative identity (one rooted in individual and family experience rather than in public or political expression of particular espoused traits).  But it is certainly not singular or essentialised.

 

And in fact, this is why I respect Gwee’s review, because he too is trying to resist the normalisation of Singaporean literature, although I don’t think that is what Over There (Singapore) is trying to do at all.

 

I’d argue that this anxiety of identity is a trait of a certain generation of writers (Lee Tzu Pheng’s "my country and my people" being perhaps the more well known and early example of this), and that more recent works have simply taken it as a given and moved on.

 

I was once at a festival in Darwin where one of the writers (Jan Cornall, I think) argued that we are all "mongrel" beings. And I remember saying, on the contrary, that the term was somewhat meaningless to me because it implies a certain essentialist purity exists to which mongrel would be a useful relative term.  I don’t feel mongrel at all, and it is an (offensive) assertion of power to say "look, you guys are basically a mix of X + Y", as if X + Y were the only possible terms, or were not in themselves a function of a diverse and complicated history.

 

AA

I was at that conference too. I remember you face when you heard that comment! (We both had terrible hangovers!) I asked about Miriam because it seems to be a very strong feeling – this caught in-between thing – for her. But an interesting contrast is Mateer’s interpolation of himself as a metaphorical brother to a Malay in Singapore and the Real. Mateer was born in South Africa and has an Afrikaans background, but Mateer as the poetic persona is a nomadic visitor or outsider with a particular insight into the places he goes to. Mateer can interperpolate himself into the position of the insider, or at least speaks of finding the exiles like himself. Mateer becomes textually Malay. I quote:

 

As if he wasn’t waiting for me he was, on Armenian Street

in the kopitiam, rising from a circle of familiars,

gliding towards me like the Orang Laut

for whom he once waited on a beach in Riau year-long

until that one dawn. Extending his hand, we greet like Malays everywhere;

he a nomad, I an exile, both of us friends in a poem by Rumi.

And we speak of histories before the city-state,

 

(‘Singapore and the Real’)

 

I am struck how Mateer sees the Malay as a fellow nomad because it could be a bit of stretch to describe Malay citizens of Singapore as nomads. Or is this the predicament of the Malay in Singapore? They ARE seen as outsiders on account of race?

 

AP

There is definitely that sort of action going on… Alfian Saat (who isn’t in the book unfortunately) makes references to the Prince of Palembang and all that, invoking the spirits of “histories before the city-state”. But actually other Malay writers can be quite a bit more subtle.

 

Also, I suspect they would take issue with being too closely interpolated with Arabic culture (Rumi, Nomad) – Southeast Asian Islam and culture as practiced by the indigenous Malay community is quite different from that of the Middle East and it can sometimes be quite a touchy issue because of the undue influence of Wahabist/Arabic Islam on indigenised Southeast Asian Islam (equivalent of how the charismatic churches from the US are taking over Anglican congregations in the UK). Malay is NOT = Muslim or to be more specific, Muslims everywhere are NOT alike. BUT perhaps what Mateer writes is correct for the specific individual he met and is writing about.

 

AA

Yes, I too would be disturbed if readers misread Mateer’s subtle naming strategies here. It would be wrong to assume Malay (specifically the cultures of a very much grounded grouping of Southeast Asian/Polynesian peoples) is identical to that of the Arabic Middle East, simply because they happen to share a religion. If Malays were nomads, the whole indigenous politics of “bumi putra” (sons of the earth) that is so fraught in Malaysia would not make sense at all!!!

 

AP

Your question got me pondering further about the nature of the commonality Mateer is claiming (and this is without judging its validity but more about trying to understand what he is getting at). Is he suggesting that nomads are like exiles (even though they are different forms of roaming, clearly)?  Or rather, what is the nature of their similarity – is it the common courtesy, mutual hospitality and suspension of judgment that travelers extend to each other? Is he invoking nostalgia?  And to what purpose?
 
Or perhaps he is suggesting that they roam in a particular orbit, they are both people who frequently disappear and therefore bear no permanent attachment to particular coordinates. I find that idea quite evocative –it implies a certain non-committal nonchalance, a sort of gypsy rakishness and opportunism (piracy?) that isn’t necessarily uncomfortable or out of place. 
 
Is this a subtle way of characterising the Malay situation in Singapore?   Perhaps.  But it could also be a way of speaking of the Singaporean condition in general.  I took this race-neutral reading as a possibility because there really isn’t anything definitive in the text to suggest that the friend he meets is in fact Malay.  It is all implied only; race/culture is rendered in simile: “like Malays” / “like the Orang Laut”.  Facsimiles and approximations, but not necessarily the thing itself.  A certain tentativeness, a shying away from rootedness in meaning, intent, purpose or destination. “Departing”, but not arriving or moving towards. Nomadic even in the language.
 
In that sense, Mateer’s poem is a clarification of Miriam’s uncertainty and unwillingness to be named-to-place… and I might add, a certain nomadic imagination would not be a bad way to characterise more recent poetry (in English) from Singapore in general, especially as the public rhetoric that Miriam talks about stiffens and dominates discourse about identity. A side comment is of course that Australia is one of the places to which restless Singaporeans wander… but I don’t really want to load Mateer’s poem with that.
 
AA
Mateer has quite brilliantly undercut narrow ideas of national identity based on race, and Malays are a perfect metaphor for the kind of people spread across four or five different countries. It’s like a pan-African vision but the Africans are now Malays! It is fascinating how Mateer (I mean the persona in the poem) compares himself to the exile who meets a nomad, and that seems a very un-Singaporean celebration, as it seems to me that most of the poets you have chosen don’t feel exiled at all. It seems there is a definite career path for the Singaporean Anglophone writer, I mean the one who goes to Britain, Australia, or the States for education, then comes home, or doesn’t. But nomadic? Yes, in the sense that Singaporeans feel comfortable with the modern cosmopolitan city whether it is New York, London, Sydney, or Perth. They move freely and easily between these places.
 
AP
You’re right: I’d venture to argue that the non-English writing community is even less nomadic – it is the use of the international (and ethnically neutral in Singapore) language of English that allows for economic (and by some extension literary) nomadism to occur. One criticism that might be leveled at, say, Malay and Tamil (and pre-contemporary Chinese writing) is that it’s really rather parochial (!)
 
I wonder if Mateer is romanticising the Malay mystique. Then again, this refusal to be pinned down may be a relatively modern affluent Singaporean phenomenon. But as you astutely pointed out, even the restless have a relatively clear path – either/or. I’m not sure nomadic cultures don’t roam a set orbit however.
 
All this bears thinking about.  My question would be: where does Mateer locate himself in this spectrum? Also, does he find an equivalent nomadic instinct in Australia? Is there something Malay about it too? Would Australian writers concur?
 
AA
Depends what we define as nomadic. How many Malays really travel within the region of Indonesia and Malaysia? To answer that we would have to look at Malay-language (Bahasa Malayu) poetry which is beyond the brief of this anthology. I have noted however that a lot of Malay language poets have travelled to the Middle East. I think a similar imagination concerns the Iraqi-Australian poet Ali Alizadeh (represented in this anthology) who writes of the cultural exportation of Michael Jackson to Iran – the ubiquity and intrusion of Middle-Eastern tastes, "gaudy popular culture". He writes with a sense of irony of Iranian anti-colonial rhetoric which aligns globalised pop culture with "Great Satan’s Culture".
 
In contrast, ideology is absent in the poems of Peter Minter and Kate Fagan. ther work suggests a "natural" world seen through the senses of a free-wheeling spirit. Fagan’s interests are biological and poetic. Nomadic means different things and clearly the modern Australian Indigenous person can travel from place to place, visiting friends and relatives, and so can anyone. But on the whole poets stick to places they know well.
 
Fagan writes ‘I witness your bird-becoming’, ‘our seagull voices’, a geometry borrowed from trees; a poetic about human/nature nexus that is stylistically a thousand miles from the English Romantic poets in prosodic terms, but very much similar in its reverence for the natural world (I think the poems, esp. ‘Stem’, successfully close gaps between human and natural, language/sense/world. A new materialist logos, rather than one where God exists.
 
In his introduction John Kinsella describes this selection as an example of international regionalism, Australia as country of travellers, who look outside in order to define the space of where we they are from. This stance seemingly co-exists with a sense of the “internationalist” looking out. Take David McCoohey’s "travel poem" about Orchard Road Singapore":
 
Out of a bangra nightclub and its Bollywood writhing
 
– the Tamil drummer of mind, turbaned, arm raised still
in the zenith of a throb – you emerge
into an impossibly deserted Orchard
where the taxis are freeze-framed
and the road is slick and black
and steaming like new, hardening lava
and everyone is blurred by alcohol,
sweating with all the effort of world-creation,
and the only – if that may be named – ‘action’
are those transsexual’s eyes enervating every YOU.
 
(“One Night”)
 
This is energising, though it uses the distancing 2nd person in a way that a lot of modernist Australian poets do, and this places critical distance between the writer and the scene. I wondered if this self-conscious and self-critical technique existed in the Singapore oeuvre? Also, to return to the stance of indeterminate identity, do Singaporean poets share Miriam Lo’s refusal to be pinned down by a regional identity, as she sums up the conditionality of being both Australian and Singaporean:
 
caught between sinking and swimming,
as I am caught now. As if rhetoric mattered.
As if this place gives me a name for myself.
 
This leads to another question about who the implied addressees are in a poetry of regional internationalism. Pam Brown’s parodic hymn, ‘to a city’
 
To a city where I’ll remember nothing
But a clump of yachts
 
appeals to her familiar literary community, is addressed to her Sydney ‘"crew", but it also addresses her US readership. Sydney, like Singapore, is now so "international" that a stubbornly provincial poetry might seem anachronistic (but I am not sure it is), and it is amusing to read Pam looking over her shoulder at her compatriots whom she never addresses directly. Her critical distance allowes her to attack political complacency in her home town with a stylish insouciance:
 
Except for the Greens
I’m weary of your politics too.
The immigrants
Are fed up with your cockroaches
And scurrying rats.
 
McCoohey’s reader might be anyone, Mateer’s is the ideal nomad/exile, Kinsella’s Nguyen poem is aimed squarely at the Singaporean authorities who executed Nguyen. Consider the more personal voice of say Boey Kim Cheng or the intimate mode of address in Heng Siok Tian’s poems, which deconstruct familiar icons of traditional Chinese culture – chopsticks and painting. Her method is to put herself into the subject directly, without the distancing tone that McCoohey favours. ‘I’ve got Mail’ is an interesting version of the epistolary letter, written from Brooklyn to – I assume – an unnamed Singaporean reader? It is interesting that the assumed readers in many of these poems are not "international", westerners, but fellow Singaporeans who might share the poet’s sense of displacement, as in this poem:
 
How do I sail from here,
when the outside drowns me,
wandering lonely, light as ash?
 
Clearly, this is energising, though it uses the distancing 2nd person in a way that a lot of modernist Australian poets do, to place some critical distance between the writer and the scene. I wondered if this self-conscious and self-critical technique is dominant in the Singapore oeuvre?
 
AP
Yes, it is. It’s a fairly common technique, that ranges from a kind of “multi-masking” technique (Felix Cheong’s “Instructions from a Serial Killer” but also his entire collection Broken by the Rain; Ng Yi-Sheng uses similar I believe), to  the relatively more simplistic reflective 2nd person of Colin Tan.  I’d argue I use it in “When the Barbarians arrive” and in some other pieces not in the collection.  There’s quite a lot similar to what McCoohey does, in the work of Toh Hsien Min and Yong Shu Hoong.  And of course, Edwin Thumboo (“Ulysses by the Merlion” being so clichéd I refused to include it). But it shows up in Paul Tan and Eddie Tay as well, I’d argue. And certainly in a subtle way in Daren Shiau’s “A Lion, in Five Parts” (note: 9 August is Singapore’s National Day, marking our independence). Also Madeleine Lee’s “three cubes on ice: Singapore ice” does it in a somewhat wry fashion.
 
I suppose you could point to a trend and say it’s particularly prevalent among a generation of younger, cosmopolitan writers who tend to be pursuing careers with a distinctively international component. That said, Singapore being what it is in terms of size, looking out to look in is almost a running joke and just about all our “travel poems” work that way.
 
I like Hsien Min’s idea in “Aubergines” that “we lease our spirits from our languages”, implying that we have multiple leases and a complex, perhaps hybrid (but I hate that word because it implies that there is such a thing as purity) spirit. I wonder though if that is what you mean, and if I have answered your question. 
 
AA
I am very interested in how poets create a readership and the idea of poetry as public address and whether newer poets care much for that.,I mean when a reader is constructed by the poem through rhetoric as in the phrase "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!" The poet creates an implied interlocutor, or quite simply addresses that reader as "you".  Or are poets happy to be “writing for ourselves”? Is there a sense of a public reading us? Who are the implied addressees in Singaporean poetry, especially if we define Singapore as a place of strong regional internationalism?
 
AP
I’d actually argue that despite the apparent object being addressed in the poem(s), the actual addressee in terms of the thrust and intent of the poem is frequently the subject himself/herself rather than another (outside) Singaporean reader. This “writing to yourself” even when writing to another person is common – it is meditative in some writers (Angeline Yap, Yong Shu Hoong) and can be insistent, even testimonial in intent (Cyril Wong).
 
I’d argue that apart from writers such as Alfian Saat (whose polemic is infamous) and Edwin Thumboo – writers in other words who are extremely self conscious of their assumed reception, audience, and stance – most Singaporean poets tend towards the quiet observation, the lyrical muttering under the breath.   Who is Eddie Tay addressing but the mirror, in “On the Treadmill”?
 
Angeline Yap’s “September (2. For you)” is interesting in this regard; the creation of a reader may well be the most unacknowledged yet key project of contemporary Singaporean poetry – particularly since the readership of poetry can NOT be assumed to exist in a pragmatic city where the study of literature has been steadily renounced as difficult and frivolous. 
 
Cyril famously declared that only poets read poets anyway, so he might as well write for them.
 
I think many Singaporean writers are engaged – not quite in revisionist historicizing, but – in creating alternative forms of memory that resist the bland surfaces offered up by tourist images, propaganda and advertising – in which we are of course awash.   Aaron Lee’s “Alternative History of Singapura” is the opposite of exoticising.    I think the “displacement” you point to is not that of being adrift culturally, but of media and cultural whitewash – what Alfian once called having “lost my country to images”. 
 
The sensitive Singaporean’s response to the superficiality of identity rhetoric is to go for depth, not withdrawal. This is not to say “I don’t quite feel Singapore or Australian or Chinese” but to say, “Being Singaporean Chinese means so much more than what it appears”. I personally believe this is why Singaporean poetry moved decisively away from the early declamatory rhetoric of Thumboo’s “Ulysses” phase, much to his initial chagrin (he has since come around to the other position of valuing the intimate rather than public voice again). I like Yong Shu Hoong’s idea of being “amphibious”, the young Yi-Sheng and Teng Qianxi’s shapeshifting demigods borrowed from mythology. Does that make sense?
 
AA
Yes, and I am interested in how Australian poets are doing similar things with our historical memories – I am thinking of Jennifer Harrison especially, who writes of "country" and its human figures in ways that builds on our "settler" traditions, in an innovative way. If I can make a generalization about John’s selection, it is that the idea of the touristic Australia of shrimps on barbies doesn’t appear (thank God!), except as the target of satire and linguistic deconstruction in say Pam Brown’s or Michael Farrell’s poems. As result, the implied readers are varied. There is a sense of poets writing for readers who are like themselves, but not readily identifiable as figures of nation, and so the idea of a "public stance" for the Australian poet is as remote as it is for Edwin Thumboo now, who, when he was writing in the service of post-colonial Singaporean nationalism, was utterly relevant to his time. The exception to this post-Romantic lyrical stance is, I feel, present in the indigenous poetry of Fogarty and others. Here there is clearly an audience defined in terms of the Settler/Indigenous binary, though that’s breaking down, as it should, considering how diverse Australia is these days.
 
Ouyang Yu, also, might be read as someone who writes for readers with a vested interest in cultural/linguistic translation, and writing about this issue in a wry, ironic, but passionate way. At the risk of sounding controversial, I would say that Singaporean writers take multi-lingualism for granted, while accepting English as language of a national poetics, and this is the backwash of the hierarchies set up by the colonial era. Similarly, in Australia, it’s still a struggle to include bilingual consciousness within the orbit of Australian poetry
 
Alvin, as a way of coming to some sort of ending for this interview, how do you see experimentation operating in Singapore?
 
AP
I’d say contemporary English poetry in Singapore is relatively conservative in terms of linguistic and formalist experimentation; the last great innovator was really the late Arthur Yap, and he was coming from a modernist (and I suspect structuralist) re-take on Singaporean linguistics. I find contemporary verse in the Chinese language capable of much more experimentation, but this is also only true of the younger (40 and under) generation of poets who have grown up on a diet of international writing.
 
There are exceptions, however, to the dominant lyric / scannable free verse mode.   Kai Chai is one of them, as is evident from OVER THERE, and younger poets like Yi-Sheng roam a much broader range than the rest. Kai Chai, as a music and pop journalist, no doubt draws from those fields (the Beats and more) as much as from the literary canon, and it shows. I guess he’s about the closest we have to a Michael Farrell in style.
 
Toh Hsien Min is the founding editor of QLRS, and also its poetry editor; although himself (usually) a formalist in style (he’s written a whole book of strictly metric/rhyming crypto-sonnet sequences!), he is open to a broad spectrum of tastes and styles in the poems he lets into the journal. July 2008 was the very first time that someone else picked the poems – Kai Chai usually does the fiction.  Given Kai Chai’s writing style is so markedly different, there was casual and friendly conversation whether this would influence the sort of poems that showed up, but like HM said, the selection has turned out to be very much business as usual, and KC has not brought in (or has not received) all that many more boldy experimental works than usual.   So HM is commenting, as Editor and the usual Poetry Editor, on KC as a guest editor of poetry. Not being unfriendly btw. 
 
That your [meaning Australian poetry’s, AA] work would be considered relatively more experimental in nature just tells you how relatively conservative our verse is. It’s something that has been remarked on for OVER THERE: Singapore section also… by none other than Hsien Min himself!
 
We’ve had our own discussion on why this is so… especially given that most of us writing today are not in fact common products of the same NUS English program… we hail from all sorts of professions and varsities and reading diets.   One possible answer is that certain sorts of verse get published at the expense of others.   The other take is simply that the sort of books that become available to the diet through bookstores and reading lists everywhere is remarkably narrow in scope, and there isn’t really a strong tradition of formal innovation to draw on in resistance to that.  So we write like how we read.   A corollary to that is that Singapore poetry is actually quite sensitive  (too responsive?) to readership, and there is this covert or overt desire to connect and communicate with the small and undernourished literary audience we have here, so nothing too off-putting or difficult.   But that is perhaps an unkind way of putting it.
 
 
 

 

Meena Kandasamy

Meena Kandasamy (b.1984) is a Chennai-based writer and activist. Her
debut poetry collection Touch, with a foreword by Kamala Das was
published in 2006 (Peacock Books, Mumbai). Two of her poems have won
first prizes in pan-Indian poetry contests. Her poetry has appeared in
several online and print magazines including The Little Magazine,
Indian Literature, Kavya Bharati, Carapace, QLRS
. Her work has also
been featured in the Poetry International Web, and Other Voices
Poetry. She is presently writing her first novel titled, Gypsy Goddess.
On the most poetic days, she is a Dalit activist and translator. She blogs at
http://meenu.wordpress.com

   

 
Straight Talk
 
adanga marupom, aththu meeruvom
thimiri ezhuvom, thirippi adippom
 
Everyone speaks of him.
 
Hands dancing in air
they gush about the power
of his words his flourishes
of rhetoric his direct approach
adanga marupom, aththu meeruvom
his raw reproach his felicity in
ferocious Tamil his three hours in
the sweltering heat rousing
angry young man rally speeches
that make men out of mice and
marauding wildcats out of men
fiery speeches that subvert and
overturn and unseat and revolt
thimiri ezhuvom, thirippi adippom
spontaneous speeches that unsettle
states and strongmen and sinister
systems of caste and speeches that
seek to settle scores delivered in
his voice that makes skyscrapers
fall to their knees
 
adanga marupom, aththu meeruvom
thimiri ezhuvom, thirippi adippom
 
He is the greatest orator
in our language today, they say.
 
I wonder how easily led people are.
 
Even I loved his speeches best,
until, one day, seven years ago,
I fell in love with the many registers of his silences.
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 

Mrs. Sunshine
 
She left him without warning.
 
She left him because she didn’t fancy
the way he flaunted his fire, his fist
and his million blistering fingers
that were always in heat.
 
So, she left him with her shadow
as acting spouse, for keeping house.
 
He went wild.
 
He went looking for his absconding
angel of tears and caustic tongue, his
angel of bleeding bare bones, his angel
of monthly mood swings. He went
looking over salt seas that shunned
his shine, over cities with skyscrapers
that stared into his eyes and over
obscure lands that chose to look away. 
 
Lovesick, he lost his fiery temper,
his high temperature, his feverish fondness
for flames and furnaces and he became
a man of moderation. Running behind
a woman on the run, he became
a master of masquerade.
 
He turned romantic. He longed 
for the soiled scents of rain
for the solitary shade of trees
for mist that hung heavy like his heart.
He squandered his insufferable splendor.
He turned black. He turned dark.
 
She returned in a twilight drizzle
and offered a truce before he made
the final offering of himself. She said:
 
     When the world has closed its eyes
     And as we become the one beast
     With two backs, you can
     Lay your lights in me.
    
She also whispered:
 
     For old times sake,
     I will hallucinate
     your halos, your holiness.

 

 

Cyril Wong reviews The Kingsbury Tales by Ouyang Yu

The Kingsbury Tales

By Ouyang Yu
Brandl and Schlesinger
ISBN 978-1-876040-82-6
 
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG

 

In The Kingsbury Tales, Ouyang Yu has decided that he has written a novel, instead of just a collection of poems. Although there is no overarching, dramatic narrative beyond the physical and emotional transitions the poet makes between Australia, China, and even Singapore, Yu’s latest verse volume is arguably a novel in the Bakhtinian sense. Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has made a general point about poems for when they are potentially novelised: “They become…dialogised, permeated with laughter, irony, humour, elements of self-parody and finally…the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.” Bakhtin has emphasised that a novel is dialogical by being constituted by various autonomous discourses in respect to which the author takes the position of an interlocutor.

 

This is certainly the case here, in which Yu’s book consists of an imagined, or remembered, smorgasbord of characters held together by the poet’s critical and poetic imagination. If one is searching for narratives in these poems, they can be found in the established, historical ones that intersect across the poet’s diasporic position as a Chinese writer living in Australia (Kingsbury, Victoria, to be exact.) The Kingsbury Tales has irony and humour, but they are subsumed under the long shadow of melancholy (life, Yu writes in the book’s closing poem, is, for an old man, “not worth living / Better never born”.) This melancholy permeates the poems as they struggle to expose the often discomfiting “openendedness” of historical discourses and contemporary multiculturalism (an openendedness that also exists in the definition of genres like the novel form, which Yu unabashedly exploits for his purposes here). Divided into general sections such as Historical Tales, Women’s Tales, Migrants’ Tales, Singapore Tales etc., the poems within them care less about offering an aesthetic thrill than about conveying a sense of jarring displacement or tragedy that stems from the poet or his characters being unable to make sense of the world.

 

From a poem like “An Aboriginal Tale,” in which the poet parallels the same racism faced by both an Aboriginal person and a Chinese woman, to a poem like “Shanghai Women” about how a Shanghainese woman, who is “living a not very interesting Australian life,” longs to return to China with the ashes of her dead husband, Yu starkly brings to our attention the real life stories and microscopic incidents that go wrongfully unnoticed by larger narratives about society. The poet’s own life is put under scrutiny too. In “The Palm Reader’s Tale,” the palm reader takes the poet’s hand and reads him as a man “not content with doing one thing only” and notes that whatever he does, “there is always something there that tries to frustrate it or him.” Restlessness and frustration are the fuel that drives these poems to form a picture of what John Kinsella has described, in his preface, as “a paranoid zone wrestling with its own exclusion and belonging.” What is excluded are the oppressive ideologues according to which our lives are forcibly aligned, while what belongs in the picture, or Yu’s poetic zone, is the indeterminacy and fragmented nature of dissonant, cultural units that the poet, and other diasporic figures like the poet, are forced to hold together within the conflicted spaces of their own self-identification.

 

If language is the entryway into a different culture, then it is also how we most evidently manifest our inability to ever assimilate ourselves. In “New Accents,” the character, “C from Canton,” mispronounces the word “English” as “Anguish,” indicating the pain that comes from being thrown into a culture that one often remains paradoxically excluded from. It is a paradox that a poet like Yu is struggling to resolve, and also—hence offering another paradox—not resolve, at the same time. On one hand, the poet aims to re-imagine a new linguistic space for cultural disparities, yet it is a space of more conflict than harmony, more chaos and shit than the shaking of hands. After the poem, “Holding Up The Candle,” where the poet recounts a story in which an officer accidentally writes ju zhou (raise the candle) in a letter to a friend, turning this innocuous phrase into a sentimental call for courage to illuminate dark times, comes the incongruous poem, “Bowel Movements, A Tale.” The opening of bowels is a recurring image throughout the book. In the latter poem, the poet contemplates on how even falling snow is like shit issuing from the sky’s anus.

 

This is a poetry that is deliberately full of it. The poet makes a convincing case: history is full of stifling delusions of grandeur and hypocrisy—full of shit, and so is culture. It is this shit that we have to deal with whenever we find ourselves in the position of being rudely and unsympathetically marginalised within the context of a new place and language. The idea that the world would be a much better and harmonious place if different races would simply sleep with each other, is a point that Yu humorously, and not un-seriously, makes in the poem “The Mix,” where he writes, “This racial mix, which, in typical Ouyang speak, is the great Fuck.” From shit to plain fucking, the poet ends the book with a section of No Tales (obscenity shifts to a critical discussion of nothingness), in which Yu writes, in “This No Thing, A No Tale,” “This no thing, the notion of a no / In the heart of us…Years in denial, self denial, soul denial…Constituting the smallest part of this nation this notion / The biggest part of this no thing”. The “no” becomes not just the “no” of denial, a repressive denial of the inconsistencies of cultural identities, but also the “no” that signals, within the poems, the emptiness of such discourses that we have to simultaneously accept and deny in order to play our roles in the socio-cultural game of history, as well as stay sane, keeping our heads and souls above the excrement of it all.

 

 

Kristin Hannaford reviews A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar by Kerry Leves

A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar

By Kerry Leves

Puncher & Wattmann
ISBN 0-9752405-4-4

Glebe, 2008
Order Copies from http://www.puncherandwattmann.com

 

Reviewed by KRISTIN HANNAFORD


Sometimes you have a book that travels with you.  A collection of poems which has secreted itself into a handbag or suitcase, a book you grab and keep chancing upon like a forgotten bus ticket floating at the bottom of a purse or wallet.  Kerry Leves’s A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar has been my bus ticket for the past eight months. It has travelled to Sydney with me, to Brisbane; it has ferried back and forth to work and made appearances at lunch hours patiently offering up delicious snippets of India.

Carrying the book in the backseat of a Brisbane taxi I ask my Indian taxi driver if he is familiar with Lata Mangeshkar; he seamlessly negotiates city streets while enthusing over her beautiful voice.  Lata Mangeshkar is also known as the Nightingale of India.  Her pre-recorded voice can be heard in thousands of Indian films as female actors dance and sing through their lip-synced Bollywood musical extravaganzas. The taxi driver and I discuss his home town of Mumbai and the hugely successful Bollywood film industry. He states very seriously about his intentions on returning home to India, ‘God wants me to be a Taxi Driver for a while and then I will be an actor!’

So it seems that as I dip in and out of this collection, despite the fact that I have never been to India, that the connections between my world here in Australia and those of India are many.  A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar takes place, for this reader, in that wider ‘mythic’ India; the rich tapestry of Hindu gods and temples imbued with colour, energy and noise of people and the streets. The collection opens with ‘Mumbai’, a beautiful poem simply focussing on the sights and sounds of the ‘pearl-dust’ dawn in the city which carries the title line,

            There ought to be a shrine

 

            to Lata Mangeshkar,

            her honeysuckle tones,

           

& all the faces

            she has ever sung.

            (12) “Mumbai”

 

‘Mumbai’ delivers an Indian street symphony. The couplets in the poem serve to slow down the reader, we survey the city, listen to the rising cacophony of street sounds, which quieten to silent prayers ‘& the god in a knee-high roadside shrine/ is only colour loud; is quiet’ . In the final couplets the Mumbai crescendo peaks with the arrival of the day,

           

            Breakfast puris tan

            in oil that seethes;

 

            blue flames hiss, a kettle blackens –

            welcome! Welcome to Mumbai!

            (12) “Mumbai”

 

It’s hard to imagine living in a city as large as Mumbai, with close to nineteen million people, its competing for the spot of the world’s most populous city. Leves’s sensory exploration of the city is delightful and his attention to imagery works well throughout the book, lines such as ‘The sun/churns the river.’(Himachal morning) and

                       

late 20th century fireflies

swarm

                        & spin the darkness

like a raksha’s eyes

 

Rough sprits guard this valley

                        where town lights

networked close along the river

                        form a yoni –

 

coincidentally

                        map a Goddess part

on Shiva’s inky carbon –

(15) “Night piece, Himachal’

 

suggest a sensitivity and awareness of the intimate connections between people, environment and spirituality in India as the poet observes the landscape at the foothills of the Himalayas.

 

The collection is prefaced with a quote from Indian Poet Keki N. Daruwalla, ‘In an alien land, language itself turns brown and half-caste’, which I believe gestures towards the difficulty of processing and translating experiences of ‘elsewhere’ into language, into poems. The writing inherently becomes happily muddied, infused with words, experiences and traces of the ‘alien land’, both shaken up by the experience and transformed. In an effort to guide those readers who are less au fait with Indian phrases and concepts, like myself, Leves has included a meaty glossary at the back of the book.

It appears Leves first began this collection in the 1980s (or at least this is where some of the poems were conceived) when he travelled in India with well-known Australian poet Vicki Viidikas. Viidikas is included in the oft-quoted ‘Generation of ‘68’ which includes poets such as Robert Adamson, John Forbes, Ken Bolton and John Tranter; poets active and engaged in the inner city Sydney poetry scene in the late 60s and 70s. Many accounts exist detailing the poetry and personalities of this time; Ken Bolton’s recollections of this time in Sydney are particularly interesting. Viidikas died in 1998 and Leves dedicates this collection to her.  Viidikas’ presence in these poems is large; in many ways she appears in these poems as Leves’ muse, visions of her appear as moments of enlightenment or struggle, in Kali:

            a golden doll a crazy-clock but animated using

            all her wicked tickling wit to tick him off

            stick-limbed a cloud of incense

            sandalwood the scent                        she is

translucent like and autumn leaf

(37) “Kali”

 

This poem explore the concepts of the Hindu Goddess Kali as seductive and beguiling, a woman capable of change and cruelty, the reader gets a sense of Viidikas’ ‘slavic cheekbones vast dark eyes/ with sly dimensions swim for his subconscious striking out’ and her charged and unsettled emotional life. The narrator is her ‘Magister Ludi’ (Leves’s witty reference to the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name) and the reader begins to glimpse here the complexity of the relationship – is the poet suggesting he is, like Joseph Knecht in Hesse’s novel,  a servant  or slave? Or is she/he a willing ‘intellectual’ participant playing a complex game of thoughts?  I’m happy to be left in the dark here, because this is one of those times when complex layers of meaning joyfully saturate and obscure the ordinary. As Kali draws to a close the narrator knows he is ‘second’ in this relationship, second in love, second to her demands and ideals:

            he sometimes fights their way onto trains and buses

            can discuss the gods & God

till the candle’s low

till the flame’s engulfed

& through all this

she clarifies

                        that it’s not enough

no never enough (for her)

 

for him it’s close to perfect

(40) “Kali”

 

Viidikas also wrote a collection of poems from her time in India called ’India Ink.’ I’m sure it would make interesting reading alongside Leves’s work; a kind of dialogue of poems and experiences of India.

 

Some of the poems in this collection predictably fall into the postcard poem basket, providing glimpses and observations rather than sustained insight, but I believe this is part of the appeal of a collection of travel poems – sometimes the view from the street or out the window is enough.  There are, however, many interesting sequences of poems. I particularly enjoyed ‘Monkey Balconies’ (pp.60-67) which explores the journey to Shimla, the old summer capital of the British Raj when India was under English rule. Images define the mismatch of ‘English swings, fields, stiles’ and the ‘paan stained bathroom’.  The narrator experiences his ultimate severance from the landscape, traces his place in this strange misted vision of England and India:

                       

So this is seeing the world

            without Hindustani: a tartan shawl

            bundles my bones together.

            Into & out of the mist, I’m a walking

            shadow of history. Must be the altitude –

            not even drugs can earth me.

 

The sequence ends with ‘Celestials’, the poet negotiating Jakko Hill, the shrine of Hanuman the monkey God.  Here the monkeys rule. Aggressive and ‘ungodly animals’, any reader familiar with experiences of monkeys and temples (or for that matter any place where the native animals have been encouraged to seize food) will get a smile out of Leves’s clever depiction of a tug of war between the narrator and a monkey over that aforementioned ‘tartan shawl’. Comic images ‘descending into Monkey Hell’ and of a tireless priest ‘flailing a knotted club/ in some karmic fandango’ are memorable and witty.

 

A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar is Kerry Leves’s long awaited fourth collection of poems, following Green (SeaCruise, 1978); Territorial (AnT Studios, 1997) and the chapbook Water roars, illusions burn (Vagabond, 2002).  For the armchair traveller or India enthusiast,  A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar is certainly well worth a read. The collection reflects Leves’s longevity as one of Sydney’s most interesting poets.

 

Ana Blandiana translations by Daria Florea

Daria Florea was born in Romania in 1964. She is an enthusiastic single parent and short story writer currently undertaking her post graduate studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. After fleeing the communist dictatorship in her home country and residing in Australia for almost 20 years, she has rekindled a professional interest in the literary and political themes in Ana Blandiana’s poetry.

 
Hibernare

Nu-i asculta pe fraþii mei, ei dorm,
Ei nu-nþeleg cuvintele care le strigã,
În timp ce urlã ca niºte fiare aprobatoare
Sufletul lor viseazã stupi de albine
ªi înot în seminþe.

Nu îi urî pe fraþii mei, ei dorm,
S-au învelit în somn ca într-o blanã de urs,
Care-i pãstreazã cruntã ºi apãsãtoare în viaþã,
În mijlocul frigului fãrã-nþeles
ªi fãrã sfârºit.

Nu-i judeca pe fraþii mei, ei dorm,
Rar câte unul este trimis în trezire
ªi, dacã nu se întoarce, e semn c-a pierit,
Cã încã e noapte ºi frig
ªi somnul continuã.

Nu îi uita pe fraþii mei, ei dorm
ªi-n somn se înmulþesc ºi cresc copii

Care-ºi închipuie cã viaþa e somn ºi, nerãbdãtori,
Abia aºteaptã sã se trezeascã
În moarte.
 
Hibernation
 
Don’t listen to my brothers, they sleep.
Not understanding their own shouted words,
While they scream like approving wild beasts
Their soul dreams beehives
And they swim in seeds.
 
Don’t hate my brothers, they sleep.
Wrapped in sleep like in a bear rug,
Preserving them savage and oppressed in life,
In the middle of the senseless,
Endless cold.
 
Don’t judge my brothers, they sleep.
Seldom one is sent off into the awakening
And if he does not return, it’s a vanishing sign,
For it is still night and cold,
And the sleep continuous.
 
Don’t forget my brothers, they sleep
In their sleep multiplying and caring for children.
They believe that life is sleep and, impatiently,
Can hardly wait for their awakening
In death.

 

 

Pastel

Þara mea pãrãsitã de fructe,
Pãrãsitã de frunze.
Pãrãsitã de strugurii
Emigraþi prevãzãtori în vin,
Þara mea trãdatã de pãsãrile
Rostogolite în grabã
Pe cerul mirat ºi încã senin,

Veºnic împãcatã,
Mirosind a ierburi
Care-ºi dau sfârºitu-n soarele domol,
Credincioºi pãianjeni
Þes pânzeturi albe
Ca sã bandajeze
Locul frunzei, gol.

Noaptea stele coapte-þi
Fermenteazã cerul,
Vântul curge ziua
Tare ºi-amãrui,
Orele-þi mãsoarã
Nucile cãzând
ªi te lumineazã
Cuviincios gutui.

Pastel
 
My country deprived of fruit,
Abandoned by leaves.
Abandoned by the grapes
Migrated prudently in wine,
My country betrayed by the birds
Somersaulted in haste
In the wondering yet still clear sky,
 
Forever content,
Smelling of grasses
Which pass away in the melting sun,
Faithful spiders
Weaving white webs
To bind up
The place of leaf, empty.
 
At night baked stars
Ferment your sky,
The wind flows the day
Strong and bitter,
The hours measure your
Walnuts falling
And light you
Quinces decently.

 

 

Eu cred

Eu cred cã suntem un popor vegetal,
De unde altfel liniºtea
În care aºteptãm desfrunzirea?
De unde curajul
De-a ne da drumul pe toboganul somnului
Pânã aproape de moarte,
Cu siguranþa
Cã vom mai fi în stare sã ne naºtem
Din nou?
Eu cred cã suntem un popor vegetal-
Cine-a vãzut vreodatã
Un copac revoltându-se?

I Believe
 
I believe that we are a botanic nation
Otherwise, where do we get this calmness
In which we await the shedding of our leaves?
Where from the courage
To start sliding ourselves on the sleep-toboggan
Close to death,
With the certainty
That we will be able
To be resurrected?
I believe that we are a botanic nation-
Who ever saw
A rebelling tree?

 

 

Scaieþi ºi zei
 
Scaieþi ºi zei uscaþi de soare
Schelete lungi, subþiri de temple
Rãmase albe in picioare:
Iremediabile exemple
Ale nemorþii ca povara.
Precum o nesfârºitã varã
Timpul intreg e doar o zi
Rãmasã vãduvã de seara,
În care frunzele nu cad
ªi nu pierd pagini trandafirii.
Nu e trecut, nu-i viitor,
Un azi etern, nãucitor,
Cu soarele deasupra nemiºcat
Nemaiânstare
mãsoare
rãderostul nemuririi.
 
Thistles and Gods
 
Thistles and gods scorched by the sun,
Long, thin skeletons of temples,
Standing pale survivors:
Irreparable examples,
Undeath is like a burden.
As an unending summer
All time is only a day
Widowed since night,
In which leaves do not fall
And the roses do not lose their pages.
There is no past, no future,
An eternal today, stunning,
With the sun above unmoving
Unable
To measure
Immortality’s failure.

 

 

Cetina   
 
Spectre de brazi mai vânturã stindarde              
De ceaþã, proorocind sfârºituri noi,
Dar cine are forþa în casandre
De cetini, chiar, sã creadã, dintre noi? 
 
Pe-acelaºi loc, dar mãturând cu pãrul               
Mult cãlãtoare zãri de cãpãtâi,                     
Topindu-ºi în rãºinã adevãrul,                   
Cel necrezut în scrâºnet, mai întâi,                        
Nu pot sã plece, nici mãcar nãluci. 
În jurul lor ºi cerul ºi apa emigreazã  
Vântul întreabã-ntruna „Nu te duci?“   
Cetina plânge-n hohot „Sunt acasã.“

Fir Tree

 

Spectres of fir trees still flutter pennants

Of fog, foretelling new endings,

Yet who has the courage, in Cassandra Branches,

if only to believe, between us?

 

On the same spot, yet brushing with their hair

The all-journeying skies of endings,

Melting the truth in their resin,

That unbelieved in screech, firstly,

They cannot leave, not even as ghosts.

Around them water and sky migrate.

The wind asks constantly: “Don’t you go?”

The fir tree sobs: “I’m home.”

 

 

Torquato Tasso   
 
Veni din întuneric spre mine el, poetul,
Poetul de spaimã ratat.
Era foarte frumos. Ca la razele röntgen
I se vedea în trup poezia.
Poezia nescrisã de fricã.
"Sunt nebun" – a rostit. De altfel ºtiam
Lucrul acesta din prefeþele cãrþilor,
Dar el îºi purta nebunia ca pe-o parolã
De intrare în noi, ca ºi cum ar fi spus:
"Mã rãscumpãr astfel
De lipsa-adevãrului din poemele mele.
E preþul imens. Vin spre tine.
Primeºte-mã!"
Dar eu am rãspuns: Pleacã de-aici!
"Scriam la lumina de autodafeuri – îmi spuse –
Simþindu-mi pe trup
Cãmaºa pãroasã care se-aprinde uºor.
Odaia mea avea ochi de cãlugãri ferestre
ªi-n loc de uºi, lipite una de alta, urechile lor
ªi ºoarecii ieºind din borte erau cãlugãri,
ªi noaptea pãsãri uriaºe-n sutane-mi cântau.
Tu trebuie sã înþelegi…" ªi cu degetu-ntins
Îmi aratã în trupul meu poezia,
Poezia nescrisã…
Dar eu am þipat: Pleacã de-aici!

Torquato Tasso

 

From darkness he came towards me, he,

The poet failed by fear.

He was very handsome. Like an X-ray

The poetry could be seen in his body.

The poetry unwritten out of fear.

“I’m mad,” he uttered. Besides, I knew

This fact from book prefaces,

But he wore his madness like a password

For entering us, like he would have said:

“This is a way to redeem myself

For the lack of truth in my poems.

The price is enormous price. I come

towards you. Receive me!”

But I declined: Leave me!

“I was writing in the auto dafé’s light

– he told me – Feeling my body,

The hairy shirt that easily lights up.

My room had monks’ eyes for windows

And instead of doors, stuck one to another, their ears.

And the rats coming out of holes were monks,

And at night gigantic birds in large habits sang for me.

You must understand…” And with a pointing finger

He reveals the poetry in my body,

The unwritten poetry…

But I screamed: Leave me!

 
Fiecare miºcare

Fiecare miºcare a mea
Se vede
În mai multe oglinzi deodatã,
Fiecare privire a mea
Se întâlneºte cu sine
De mai multe ori,
Pânã
Uit care
Este cea adevãratã
ªi cine
Mã-ngânã.
Stãpânã,
Mi-e fricã de somn
ªi ruºine
A fi.
Pentru mine
Orice rãsãrit are
Un numãr necunoscut de sori
ªi-o singurã
Adormitoare
Zi.

 
 
 
Each Move
 
 
Each of my moves
Is seen
Simultaneously in many mirrors,
Each look I take 
Meets with itself
Several times,
Until
I forget which is
The true one,
And who
Mocks me.
Mistress,
I am afraid to sleep
And ashamed
To be.
For me
Each and every sunrise has
An unknown number of suns
And a single
Soporific
Day.
 
 
Descântec de ploaie

Iubesc ploile, iubesc cu patimã ploile,
Înnebunitele ploi ºi ploile calme,
Ploile feciorelnice ºi ploile-dezlãnþuite femei,
Ploile proaspete ºi plictisitoarele ploi fãrã sfârºit,
Iubesc ploile, iubesc cu patimã ploile,
Îmi place sã mã tãvãlesc prin iarba lor albã, înaltã,
Îmi place sã le rup firele ºi sã umblu cu ele în dinþi,
Sã ameþeascã, privindu-mã astfel, bãrbaþii.
ªtiu cã-i urât sã spui "Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie",
E urât ºi poate nici nu e adevãrat,
Dar lasã-mã atunci când plouã,
Numai atunci când plouã,
Sã rostesc magica formulã "Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie".
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie pentru cã plouã
ªi-mi stã bine cu franjurii ploii în pãr,
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie pentru cã-i vânt
ªi rochia se zbate disperatã sã-mi ascundã genunchii,
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie pentru cã tu
Eºti departe plecat ºi eu te aºtept,
ªi tu ºtii cã te-aºtept,
Sunt cea mai frumoasã femeie ºi ºtiu sã aºtept
ªi totuºi aºtept.
 E-n aer miros de dragoste vie,
ªi toþi trecãtorii adulmecã ploaia sã-i simtã mirosul,
Pe-o asemenea ploaie poþi sã te-ndrãgosteºti fulgerãtor,
Toþi trecãtorii sunt îndrãgostiþi,
ªi eu te aºtept.
Doar tu ºtii –
Iubesc ploile,
Iubesc cu patimã ploile, înnebunitele ploi ºi ploile calme,
Ploile feciorelnice ºi ploile-dezlãnþuite femei…
 
 
 
 
Rain Chant
 
I love rains, I passionately love rains,
Maddened rains and calm rains,
Young-girl rains and loose female rains,
Fresh rains and boring, never-ending rains,
I love rains, I passionately love rains.
I like rolling through their tall white grass,
I like to rip off their blades and wear them in my teeth,
For men to become giddy seeing me like that.
I know it’s rude to say, “I am the most beautiful woman,”
It’s rude and perhaps not even true,
But allow me when it rains,
Only when it rains,
To utter the magic formula “I am the most beautiful woman.”
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s raining
And I look good with rain’s locks in my hair.
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s windy,
And the dress desperately struggles to cover my knees,
I am the most beautiful woman because you
Are away and I am waiting for you,
And you know of my waiting.
I am the most beautiful woman and I know to wait
Yet still I wait.
The scent of live love is in the air,
And all passers-by sniff the rain to feel this scent,
During this particular rain you can quickly fall in love,
All passers-by are in love,
And I wait for you.
Only you know –
I love rains,
I passionately love rains: maddened rains and calm rains,
Young-girl rains and loose female rains. 
 

Pietà
 
Durere limpede, moartea m-a-ntors
În braþele tale supus, aproape copil.
Tu nu ºtii dacã trebuie sã mulþumeºti
Sau sã plângi
Pentru fericirea aceasta,
Mamã.
Trupul meu, dezghiocat din tainã,
Este numai al tãu.
Dulci lacrimile tale îmi picurã pe umãr
ªi mi se strâng cuminþi lângã claviculã.
Ce bine e!
Neînþelesele peregrinãri ºi cuvintele,
Ucenicii de care eºti mândrã ºi care te sperie,
Tatãl, bãnuitul, nerostitul, veghind,
Toate-s în urmã.
Liniºtitã de suferinþã-nþeleasã
Mã þii în braþe
ªi pe furiº :
Mã legeni uºor.
Leagãnã-mã, mamã.
Trei zile numai sunt lãsat sã m-odihnesc
În moarte ºi în poala ta.
Va veni apoi învierea
ªi din nou nu-þi va mai fi dat sã-nþelegi.
Trei zile numai,
Dar pânã atunci
Mi-e atât de bine
În poala ta coborât de pe cruce,
Încât, de nu mi-ar fi teamã cã te-nspãimânt,
Lin mi-aº întoarce gura
Spre sânul tãu, sugând.

 
Piety
 
Clear pain, death returned me,
To your breast subdued, almost a child.
You do not know if you should thank
Or cry
For this happiness,
Mother.
My body, peeled out of the egg of mystery,
Is yours only.
Sweet, your tears drop onto my shoulder
And collect obedient near my collarbone.
How good it is!
Uncomprehended wanderings and the words,
Disciples of whom you are proud and who scare you,
The Father, the suspected, the unnamed, watching,
All are left behind.
Free of known suffering
You hold me
And secretly
Rock me gently.
Rock me, mother.
Three days only do I have to rest
In death and in your lap.
Rebirth will come after
And again you won’t be given to understand.

 Only three days,
But until then
It is so good for me
In your lap, lowered from the cross,
That, if I would not fear to scare you,
I would turn my mouth gently

Towards your breast, to suck.

 

 

Ar trebui                                              

Ar trebui sã ne naºtem bãtrâni,
Sã venim înþelepþi,
Sã fim în stare de-a hotãrî soarta noastrã în lume,
Sã ºtim din rãscrucea primarã ce drumuri pornesc
ªi iresponsabil sã fie doar dorul de-a merge.
Apoi sã ne facem mai tineri, mai tineri,
mergând,
Maturi ºi puternici s-ajungem
la poarta creaþiei,
Sã trecem de ea ºi-n iubire intrând adolescenþi,
Sã fim copii la naºterea fiilor noºtri.
Oricum ei ar fi atunci mai bãtrâni decât noi,
Ne-ar învãþa sã vorbim, ne-ar legãna sã dormim,
Noi am dispãrea tot mai mult, devenind tot mai mici,
Cât bobul de strugure, cât bobul de mazãre, cât bobul de grâu…
 
We Should
 
We should be born old,
And arrive wise,
To be capable of deciding our worldly fate,
To comprehend from the prime crux what ways begin
And only the wish to walk to feel reckless.
Then should we become younger, and younger, walking,
Mature and strong to arrive
At creation’s gate,
To pass through it and in love entering adolescents,
To be children at our sons’ birth.
Either way, they would then be older than us,
They would teach us to speak, rock us to sleep.
We would disappear even more, becoming even smaller,
Like a grape, like a pea, like a grain of wheat…
 
 
Totul

Frunze, cuvinte, lacrimi,
cutii de chibrituri, pisici,
tramvaie câteodatã, cozi la fãinã,
gãrgãriþe, sticle goale, discursuri,
imagini lungite de televizor,
gândaci de Colorado, benzinã,
steguleþe, portrete cunoscute,
Cupa Campionilor Europeni,
maºini cu butelii, mere refuzate la export,
ziare, franzele, ulei în amestec, garoafe,
întâmpinãri la aeroport, cico, batoane,
Salam Bucureºti, iaurt dietetic,
þigãnci cu kenturi, ouã de Crevedia,
zvonuri, serialul de sâmbãtã seara,
cafea cu înlocuitori,
lupta popoarelor pentru pace, coruri,
producþia la hectar, Gerovital, aniversãri,
compot bulgãresc, adunarea oamenilor muncii,
vin de regiune superior, adidaºi,
bancuri, bãieþii de pe Calea Victoriei,
peºte oceanic, Cântarea României,
totul.
 
Everything
 
Leaves, words, tears,
Matchboxes, cats,
Trams sometimes, queues for flour,
Ladybeetles, empty bottles, speeches,
Elongated images on TV,
Colorado beetles, petrol,
Flags, known portraits,
The Euro Cup,
Trucks of gas cylinders, export rejected apples,
Newspapers, Vienna loaves, blended oil, carnations,
Airport receptions, Cico, sweet bread rolls,
Bucharest salami, diet-yoghurt,
Gypsies selling Kent, Crevedia eggs,
Rumours, the Saturday night serial,
Coffee substitutes,
The world struggle for peace, choirs,
Production per hectare, Gerovital, anniversaries
Bulgarian tinned fruit, national meetings,
Superior regional wine, Adidas shoes,
Jokes, (security police) boys on Victoria Avenue,
Oceanic fish, Ode to Romania,
Everything.

 

Angela Meyer reviews Fragile Context by Kristin Hannaford

Fragile Context
 
By Kristin Hannaford
 
Post Pressed
ISBN 9781921214189.
324/50 Macquarie St,
Teneriffe, Qld, 4005
order from postpressed@gmail.com
 
Reviewed by ANGELA MEYER
 
 
 
Poetry can exist between boundaries of communication. It can have an awareness of itself in the uniqueness of its form, unlike a blanket of prose which acts to unfold a narrative. Kristin Hannaford’s poems also thematically blur or dissolve lines, those related ones that exist between culture and nature. She invokes the binary to acknowledge one’s reliance on the other, to promote the reader’s recognition of one because of the other, and just subtly, the danger of one overwhelming the other. In such a way, the form of the poem and its awareness of itself creates a beautiful irony, that the poem is a product of culture, of humankind, but would not exist without nature’s influence. In a way then, much of the poems in ‘Fragile Context’ border on romanticism, although with the modern interruption of ‘progress’ and moments of post-modern inevitability or acceptance.
           
The poem ‘Mountain’ is a dedication to the poet’s father: a joyful poem of slowly reduced stanzas. There is an empathetic association with the father’s experience, taking a long trip to work and back each day. The narrator imagines him on the train with a utopian home-vision, a life-affirming comfort that awaits him. ‘The distance between the lookout and the car is short./Your chest is tight with breathlessness//and this view.’ The last part of this stanza is both italicised and indented to the end of the passage. It enables the reader to hold their breath on the mountain, which is metonymic for the spirituous joy in nature’s whole, as are the eucalypt leaves he inhales. Overall, the poem explores a quiet acceptance of the balance of work and home life, a gratefulness for the coexistence of environments.
           
The poet’s children and lover are an extension of the self, nature’s existence in bodily form. ‘Birthday’ presents a contemplation of aging, uncomfortably related to rough wood and the smoothing over of oil, coating as opposed to fixing. But the poet’s child’s smile brings her back to the concentration of a moment and negative reflection is transformed into ‘possibilities’. In ‘Losing the Boy’ the child is breaking his link with the mother and becoming one with new formations. Hannaford innovatively describes a skate-park and its occupants. Appropriate terminology is made poetic as the reader sees, hears and senses the environment, anxious with her to find her son. He is crossing between her and this new culture ‘Almost unrecognizable,/ my son, the man -/ if it weren’t for the blue laughter of his eyes.’ Here, the poet reclaims the son, as forever inseparable from his biology, as nature’s persistence, even when the body is immersed in cultural activity. The lover is invoked in ‘Dismembered (two voices)’. A degree of mystery is maintained in the intimacy of the poem. It literally dismembers its actors, body parts explained, explored and satisfied, or are they? The line ‘this is enough’ brings comfort. The lover also exists in ‘The Night Storms’, a poem about consistency. Where change is inevitable, a memory can reinvigorate what has gone. Around these human endings and reimaginings, nature pervades. The majestic is tied by Hannaford to the everyday – ‘Lightning appears at first as a distant flicker -/ the way a television screen lights up a hallway.’
           
The poetic observer also experiences moments alone. ‘In the Spirit of Impermanence’ is a manic poem, a rebellion. It is an ode to joyful poetry refusing to be constricted by fashions or movements. It seems inspired by frustration and a ‘throwing off’ of burdensome expectation. She encourages one to ‘abandon pronouns & spirited rehearsals’. In ‘She Leaves From an Australian Forest’ there is a less celebratory aloneness. There is a sense of loss pervading the sparse syntax. One of the few poems with no punctuation or capitals, it flows from one end to the other, space and words interpolated as the woman is with the forest she is departing from. It connotes the coexistence of woman with nature. She recalls someone who is addressed, thinking of returning to them after day-to-day frustrations, contemplating amongst ‘leaves which refuse to homogenise’. Her mood is far-reaching, it is not just the ‘you’ addressed in such statements as ‘stands of trees humanise our frailty’ but a collective. The natural elements and formations remind her of bodily features, again making human and nature synonymous. The last line is potent as we imagine her leaving this memory, this spirit to join the sun ‘ascending’, spirituality and transience are invoked, and the last line resonates with its evocative ‘sounds of sclerophyll breaking’.
           
Body/nature/art are combined again in ‘Graphica Botanica’, and in ‘Music for Insects’ with focus on the eye and vision. The poet in this one is segregated by a window, but the eye explores nature with a disembodied power. Humans are as fragile as birds in ‘Whistling’ and ‘Displacement’.
           
Narrative transition is implemented in ‘Pumpkin Island Notes’, a series of four poems. They act as a snapshot of a holiday – known and unknown, nature intertwined with history and characters melded to place – ‘a memory of place, sharp as first incision’. It is extraordinarily vivid, and thickly encapsulating. There are pieces metonymic and metaphoric – coral, bones, for an ocean, a human, a whole. They are then fleshed out with mini-narratives of characters in place – past and present. Another destination is traversed in ‘Tracing Air – South Island’. It begins almost with the rhythm of a nursery rhyme. There is a passionate embrace of nature, a moment in time. It is a poem to smile at. The voice is overwhelmed at the beginning, all is ‘too magnificent’, but then the woman and land become one, she recognises herself in it – ‘a green wild dress// riding thighs and abdomens’. The play of lines with steps and pauses, the assonance and slight-rhymes create an anticipatory envelopment. The development of tone by the end is celebratory and of a woman recognised.
           
The poet’s delight at language, the discovery of words, their usage, their bodily motion (the tongue deciphering them) is evident in much of the work. In ‘Fishing (a meditation)’ the poet applies words for the value of their sound. Scientific names ‘Saccostrea glomerata’, textural like the fingers on the fishing line. Words italicised for consideration, tied in with sensory recollection, conscious associations – ‘Estuary, the word coats tongue/ and memory, sediment. Silt/ mixtures of detritus and the fecund.’ The construction of the fisherman is not as important as the quiet, the beauty of solitude and the engagement in an enjoyed activity, much the same as reading a poem.
 
In all, there is much to discover within the pages of ‘Fragile Context’. The curiosity of language carries on to a creative curiosity of narrative. The final poem ‘Jesus in the Swimming Pool’ playfully questions a character’s existence. It is a philosophical finish to the chapbook, inviting the reader to question the environment around them, and further, themselves within the environment. In essence, it is their ‘context’ that is brought forward. Are we to float also? What does this Jesus-figure see that the other swimmers with their heads down do not? Outside the pool are the forests and mountains and many-layered humanities where each reader carves a tract. The poetic voice is not only an observer of these trajectories, but a questioner of the divisions that exist between them. Hannaford traverses nature and culture and ultimately displays awareness, preciousness, and most certainly the encouragement of joy in such fragility.  

 

Jaydeep Sarangi reviews Touch by Meena Kandasamy

Touch

By Meena Kandasamy
Peacock Books Mumbai
 
ISBN: 81-88811-87-4
 
 
Reviewed by JAYDEEP SARANGI

 

 
Dalit literatures in India are subversive, or structurally alternative to the models prescribed by traditional Hindu aesthetics precisely because they are literatures of sociological oppression and economical exploitation. Dalit literatures are essentially a shock to tradition and sense. They are an assault to the anthropomorphic practice of castism in Indian social convention. A sound piece of Dalit literature is militant in texture and aggressively blunt in meaning. It challenges codified language (because it has so far been used and manipulated only by the dominant, discriminating powers); it challenges assumptions; it challenges age-old, world-views. Its temporal and political designation does not give justice to the artist whose intentions may subsequently be ignored . It is an aesthetics of pain, and a prolonged longing; a powerful aesthetics of resistance. The poems in Touch  by Meena Kandasamy amplifies, illustrates, and carries on this struggle for power and autonomy by women poets. Apart from her expert use of language, she has a sincerity of feeling and an honesty of experience rarely encountered. For Meena Kandasamy, the young Tamil poetess, poetry is about empirical truth and experience and she writes and reflects from where she is:
 
We: their daughters,
We: the daughters of their soil.
 
We, mostly, write.”     (‘Their Daughters’)
 
Her poetry is at best of private sensibility. Her consciousness is firmly yoked to the world around her, a world characterised by ecstasy and pain, love and despair. Touch contains a  ‘Foreword’ by Kamala Das where the renowned poetess writes, ‘Older by nearly half a century, I acknowledge the superiority of her poetic vision’. Meena follows the psychological tradition of Sylvia Plath and Langston Hughes, a ‘fabric rare and strange’. Womens’ fixed role as caregivers was ideologically determined by their biological capacity to bear children and that was through a fixed set of codes represented by ‘categorizers’ as Kamala Das has expressed in her own poem, ‘An Introduction’. Meena Kandasamy regards her poetic corpus as a process of coming to terms with her identity and consciousness : her “womanness, Tamilness and low/ outcasteness”, labels that she wears with pride. Meena has honed her sociological awareness of what it means to be a woman in the caste-ridden, social groupism of Tamil Nadu (a Southern state in India).
 
Her poetic self gasps in darkness to search for her emotional root proclaiming it as her heritage. This becomes a source of vitality for the poet’s journey. Her confessional mode is not as radical as we find in Mamang Dai, Archana Sahani and Kamala Das. She explores a wide range of subjective possibilities and relates them to her own identity and sociological formulation. Her poetry arises not out of reading and knowledge, but out of active engagement. Touch is rich with varied dexterity that explore the states of mind and genuine feminine sentiments.
 
          Writing becomes a means of creating a place in the world; the use of the personal voice and self-revelation are means of self-assertion. Meena’s self-expressive poems permit forbidden or ignored emotions to be expressed in ways which reflect the true voice of feeling; she shows how an Indian woman poet can create a space for herself in the public world. Across time and space, the woman writer, especially the woman poet, is engaged in an on going dialectic with the dominant cultural hegemonies to negotiate a space for the creative woman, where authentic female experiences can be articulated freely. Meena’s poems record the age-old class hierarchy in Indian society. Her poem, ‘Becoming a Brahmin’ records the sad plight of the so-called lower class people of Indian society:
 
Step 1: Take a beautiful Sudra girl
Step 2: Make her marry a Brahmin
Step 3: Let her give birth to his female child
Step 4: Let this child marry a Brahmin
Step 5: Repeat steps 3-4 six times
Step 6: Display the end product. It is a Brahmin.
 
Here words are like quicksilver carrying with them the sparkle of sense. In the sheer magic of rhythm, music and in the beauty of coalescing visual and auditory sensations, these lines are rarely surpassed in modern Indian poetry in English.
 
 
Flaming green of a morning that awaits rain
And my lover speaks of rape through silences,
Swallowed words and the shadowed tones
Of voice. Quivering, I fill in his blanks.
Green turns to unsightly teal of hospital beds
And he is softer than feathers, but I fly away
To shield myself from the retch of the burns
Ward, the shrill sounds of dying declarations,
The floral pink-white sad skins of dowry deaths.
                                   
                        ( “My Lover Speaks of Rape”)
 
 
             Meena’s poetic mode ranges from the meditative to sensuous where the metaphysical subtlety of arrivals and departures are ambivalent. A feature that impresses and ultimately convinces the readers is the poet’s readiness to allow conflicting voices to be heard from all contending perspectives. Her poems pose a tension that reaches out to the reader, arousing in one a sense of need that will not be satisfied:
 
“What will you say of your feeling
Living with a sister who terrorizes
Even manic depressions out of your mind?
 
 (‘Sage in the Cubicle’)
 
There is always a haunting note of despondency marked in Meena’s poetic lines. We may refer to her poem, ‘Immanuel’:
 
Now, if there be any mourning
Let it be for our heroes
Yet to die, fighting…
 
Meena’s poetic lines seem to echo from life itself, from the pauses of loss and vacuity in her sociological repression in a class-stratified Tamil society. Meena deeply penetrates the inner pores of the feminine psyche and brings out the strength and power of life. Sanjukta Dasguta, a Bengali poetess, writes
 
I am sangam and shakti
Power of fire, water, air and earth(.)
 
 (‘Identity’, Sanjukta Dasgupta)
 
Like all confessional poets, Meena gives literary form a new sense of personality, attaching value to the image of man. She raises her confessional traits to the level of a specific universal appeal. Her quest for identity is not the spiritual Odyssey; it is a human journey, a sociological journey that dignifies the reader:
 
Caste, yet again authored a tragedy
He, disease wrecked , downtrodden.
( ‘Prayers’)
 
In the poem ‘Take This for an Answering’ Meena records her voice of protest ;
 
You press me into answering
When and why and where and how
I could start to dislike you.
 
             Debates over Dalit studies in India have intensified studies of anti-colonial resistance in general which have been augmented and contested by a broad range of studies. Through Meena’s conscious poetic lines Dalits are hitting back in coloniser’s tongue. The poems in Touch represent the indigenous lifestyle. They resist colonial acts of authority and oppression through their textual transmission.

 

 

Fiona Wright

Fiona Wright is a Sydney writer, whose poetry has been published in a  variety of journals and anothologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. In 2007, she was resident at the Tasmanian Writers Centre, developing a series of poems about Australian soldiers in Sri Lanka, and in 2008 she was runner-up in the John Marsden National Young Writers Award. Fiona works as an editor for Giramondo Publishing and HEAT Magazine, and a Project Assistant for the Red Room Company. 

 

 

The Driver

Oh, he can’t speak English
            Mrs says when I ask for his name.
 
I wake
            to his stiff sweeping, the white gravel garden
bared to the first sun. Loudhailers writhe
            with morning prayers,
the taximen blessed
over the smokesong of their engines.
 
He pulls her aging BMW
through cowsome backstreets,
the corrugations of fences
barely squeezing past side mirrors,
Cliff Richard crooning through her tapedeck.
His questions fall soft, and askance.
 
The afternoon heat,
he busies in the garden, burning
            rubbish, painting windowsills,
resetting shards of glass along the wall.
 
Sometimes, I see his gaze absent
 through the slatted windows
of the main house,
where Mrs moves her dark outline
            from kitchen, to table, to easy chair,
the ceiling fan
            struggling at the waist-line frill
                        of her ossariya.
 
 
Crossing
 
First, the dust cross-pollinates.
Guards in saggy khaki scratch
their noses, phlegm-spit
before their stamps rubber
onto our watermarked papers.
The road is thick. Wads of paper money.
Laundry bags,
and swift exchanges,
the litter of planky rickshaws
            and the speeding limbs of cobble-chested boys.
They drag past crates of cigarettes, munitions
            and pickled pythons, their bulb-like elders
broadly beam and sweep their hands
at pink casinos.
Ribby women swagger under gemstones
            and rub their tongues over their teeth:
Perhaps there is no law
but human enterprise, the thick illicit
            and a price for everything.
 
 
 

Fruit Market

 
Vast bald marrows, frilled mushrooms
make us marsupial. We scamper,
the greens hustling from the woodwork.
Wheeled baskets stalk. Their leathery muscle
snaps at careless ankles.
The whiplash of green bins, cornsilks
and macheted heads of cabbages, we duck
and weave our way, as the small teeth
of asparagus grate.
 
Knobbled and gossiping fingers
pull at thin bean strings. The backpacks
are bulbous, sometimes sprouting.
The crate-jawed men compere, their howls
            reverberate and crash against the foliage:
one dollar one dollar cheapest
cheapest cheapest
try sweet lady, sweet sweet
sweet pear, try before you buy
The smell of fish curls on the edges.
 
We gather, alertly herbivorous
and chew on cherry tomatoes.
The seeds burst like blood in our mouths.