April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work
by Edwidge Danticat
Princeton University Press, 2010
ISBN 9780691140186
Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL
What does it mean to create dangerously and what compels the immigrant writer to abandon the reflections of a poetic or fictional imagination to risk arrest, failure, deportment, death, or at the very least being isolated and ignored by the literary mainstream? In a lecture given by Albert Camus, from which Edwidge Danticat borrows the title of her recent collection of essays, the Algerian-born writer/philosopher addresses the ethical and aesthetic considerations imposed by frontiers of all kinds, and by the “crudest implications of history.” It’s hard for us in the comfort zone of the antipodes to imagine a country of such humanitarian oppression as Haiti with its history of Spanish and French colonists, slave rebellion, US interventions and enforced dictators, its natural and biological disasters. What was once the ‘Pearl of the Antilles,’ one of the richest outposts of French colonialism bears a history of complex social, political and economic mutilations, which for decades writers and artists of differing persuasions have attempted to reframe. In this slim volume, Danticat upholds and celebrates this tradition of revolt against silence by readers and writers of littérature engagée, to quote Sartre’s term, and she does this with understated elegance moving between radical history, anthropology, memoir, philosophy, moving with subtlety between the real and the surreal.
As an immigrant writer, I’m intrigued by the concept of writing as an act of risk, playing out the impossibility of contact with its subject through the slippages between fiction and non-fiction in the fractured topography of diasporic narratives. If I came to Danticat’s book for further knowledge and for inspiration, I was captivated from the opening essay with its themes of urgency and sacrifice. A chilling account follows of the public execution of Marcel Nouma and Louis Drouin in Port au Prince on November 12, 1964. Both men were writers, political activists and members of Jeune Haiti, a group attempting to overthrow “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Rather than burdening the reader with literary reportage of the officially recorded scene, Danticat focuses her lens, filtering the perspective into the present tense. Her emphasis on simple detail creates an immediate and vulnerable portrait of the assassinated patriots:
Numa, the taller and thinner of the two, stands erect, in perfect profile, barely leaning against the square piece of wood behind him. Drouin, who wears brow-line eyeglasses, looks down into the film camera that is taping the final moments. Drouin looks as though he is fighting back tears as he stands there, strapped to the pole, slightly slanted. Drouin’s arms are shorter that Numa’s and the rope appears looser on Drouin.
(3)
A choice between exile and execution existed for these renegades, both of whom, being from middle-class Haitian families had begun comfortable and successful lives in the US. This kind of alternative between separation, silence and activism, is familiar to Danticat. She describes it aptly as one of her creation myths, a moment captured in history, which her father’s generation extolled as political martyrdom.
Such a symbolic act of defiance resonates long after the firing squad have completed their task. In the poetically titled essay, “Acheiropoietos,” we learn how an adolescent Daniel Morel witnessed the event. After walking past a photographic studio near his father’s bakery the following morning, Morel noticed enlargements of Drouin’s and Numa’s corpses. Morel, now an acclaimed photojournalist, cites the event as being the causal influence behind his work.
“I’d immediately wanted to be a photographer so that I could document Haitian history,” he’d said that day….”
(139)
Like many artist émigrés, Morel has suffered both in his homeland and abroad for making visible the subaltern face of Haiti’s dispossessed. Sensitive to this precarious balance, Danticat weaves poetry and philosophical meditations with biographical details of the photographer’s personal tragedies. She turns her lens to the artist as subject, while probing a more universal fear of how it might feel to be misread, mis-seen (missing?) or misunderstood. Danticat has been exposed to censure from family as well as from the wider Haitian communities for using the singularity of a narrator’s voice to dissect private afflictions or to make emblematic a nation’s complex cultural and political grievances. In her work she shares the almost-parasitic experience of those who leave a country-in-crisis for better prospects. While she returns to memorialise, to make sense of the past, others, like her uncle Joseph and her Tante Ilyana, stay behind, to document the atrocities, to maintain the physical legacy of their ancestral home.
A sense of torn loyalties and survivor-guilt becomes apparent in many of these essays as they sketch a family tree of deceased relatives: uncles and cousins brutally imprisoned or deported by the US Department of Homeland Security. Precise and metaphoric prose infuses with the beautiful and the courageous, the guapa of Creole and Vodou beliefs. Danticat explores the divisions that arise when one is cast lòt bò dlo, across the seas, or anba dlo, under the water, where the spirits are reborn. The skilful restraint she exercises never permits a tone of self-pity or sentimentality to enter the writing so that the impact of the book is all the more potent. A cultural memory in which killings, death, and disease are so mundane, so ignored by the outside world, transcends the conservative status of realism in Danticat’s capable hands.
The reader begins, ever so palpably, to perceive the spirit of the dead, undying, as living hope for the future of this beleaguered nation. Danticat acknowledges the cultural influence of Marxist–surrealist and Negritude writers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Camus in the underground staging of plays, and in clandestine book clubs, which formed a literature of resistance during the Duvalier regime. Yet what she describes as the pleasures and dangers of reading or writing could not be compared to the fear of being tortured, killed, or living in a time or place when that could happen.
Elements of amnesia as well as cultural anamnesis are shown to characterise the “dyaspora” experience. Forgetting can be an anaesthetic, a way of protecting a country from its past horrors, its internal corruptions, Danticat suggests in “Daughters of Memory,” but the immigrant writer, is twice removed from home and past.
It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pass under the trees, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains.
(65)
For Danticat’s generation the erasures of language and enforced Francophone education had effectively suppressed Haitian literature, yet she suggests, there exists a memory of amnesia in the public and private executions of the Tontons Macoutes. Many of the essays broach deeply disturbing topics with remarkable tact, a kind of seduction by which we are convinced. In the essay which commemorates Haiti’s Bicentennial, Danticat makes seamless if necessary comparisons between overthrown president Aristide and revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, between the speeches of Negro liberty and the contradictions of Thomas Jefferson’s racist declarations, which could not “reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel.”(98) Danticat’s prose seems informed by Sartre’s notions of there being an engagement between writing and society:
One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too. And it is not enough to defend them with the pen. A day comes when the pen is forced to stop and the writer must then take up arms. Thus however you might have come to it, whatever the opinions you might have professed, literature throws you into battle.
(What is Literature)
Resisting historical reality, Danticat writes as if for the freedom of sight, her voice unburdened by modernist agendas. The Vodou ceremony of Independence marked by machetes and pig blood, and Jefferson’s crude claim of “cannibalism,” appear as bizarre historical facts. As butter is made from water, what “we have come to know as magical realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti,” (103) Danticat asserts, reminding us of Alejo Carpentier’s discovery of the real maravilloso during his trip to the island. I am reminded, too, of the French poet and Antillean anthropologist, Michel Leiris, whose writing explores the function of danger in subjectivity through tauromachic tropes. For Leiris the bullfight, represents not merely personal mutilations but the agonies of the Spanish Civil War. This dance between the shadow of the bull’s horn and the shadow of recovery from its psychological wounds is akin to a transition Danticat negotiates from fiction to essay and memoir in her two most recent books, Create Dangerously and Brother I’m Dying.
Risks are taken in the poetic motifs, which segue her prose, the flow of tropes resisting a dominant discourse. Danticat speaks in near-whispers of writing against hope, as if one is summoned or driven by acheiropoietos; she cites the artist being briefly possessed by a trance as if he or she were merely a vessel for the chwal, the Vodou horseman. She evokes alternative spatial experiences but the writing remains grounded in unbiased descriptions of personal tragedies and injustice. A cultural memory is intuited to the ghost of the Brooklyn-born, Haitian-Peurto-Rican artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of an overdose. Through his story, Danticat fictionalises the seldom-voiced identity of a mixed-ancestry migrant, by re-imagining his syncretic origins, his complex threads of cultural and artistic heritage. Yet she returns to Alèrte Bélance, a victim of the 1991 terror gangs, her own tortured words. She refrains from any summary or interpretation of what the mutilated amputee speaks. I found this chapter, “I Speak Out” to be the most harrowing prose I have read in a long time.
Danticat questions her authority to speak about the Haiti earthquake. The essay, “Our Guernica” embodies her experience of returning home to engage a self that is compelled to glance, albeit briefly, beyond the grave. She writes with a humanistic responsibility to record and reframe disastrous historical realities. Her anguish, her guilt, the self-exploitation of her writing are clearly evoked for the reader. But in this chapter she describes being gripped by the sudden fear of death. Perspective shifts are finely attuned, averting any lapse into sensational or spectator reportage. In Port-au-Prince, the muse has altered. On visiting her cousin Maxo’s grave, in the rubble of a half-collapsing church she becomes aware of the hazard to herself. Panicked, she forgets her intention to leave behind a favourite book, Genet’s Les Nègres. These subjective confessions describe fragmentation and fear yet they read as unclouded. Danticat farewells her country with fragile hope, flying back to the safety of Miami but what is experienced and described is an intimate suspension between living and dying; between the fear of dying and the fear of not being able to die.
Danticat’s essays and her memoir are highly finessed and subtle. She breaches the vertiginous fault lines between the real and the surreal, between writing and archeiropoietos, between lòt bò dlo, and anba dlo. Create Dangerously celebrates love, physical beauty, painting, music and literature of a country that defies its economic oppression and invisibility, its manipulation by media stereotypes. It asks us to consider art and literature as vehicles for authenticity and self-expression, however dangerous that might be. This achievement is effortless and utterly compelling, with not one syllable or sentiment below guapa. Under the radar of humanitarian organisations the US deportations to Haiti and the death toll from cholera, with its high infant mortality, continue to rise. Danticat brings this torn world closer to our own as she questions: “How is the world reflected in a dead man’s eyes?”
WORKS CITED
Camus, Albert. Create Dangerously, a lecture delivered at the University of Uppsala, 1957, reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995)
Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature? (New York, Philosophical Society, 1949) p 65
MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her work appears in Southerly, Jacket and Pennsylvania Literary Journal. She serves as editor for Mascara Literary Review. Vishvarūpa is her forthcoming collection of poetry.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Mary Smokes Boys
by Patick Holland
Transit Lounge, 2010
ISBN 9780980571790
Reviewed by PETER MATHEWS
Patrick Holland’s second novel The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge, 2010) has received almost unequivocal praise so far from other reviewers. While Holland does have the potential to become an important writer in the future, it must also be acknowledged that this development is still very much a work in process. One striking feature of this book, as other reviewers have pointed out, is Holland’s intimate knowledge of its geographical setting, which is reflected in his ability to write in poetic detail about the landscape of rural Queensland. This skill derives from the longstanding insight that authors write best about subjects that fall within their range of experience, and Holland, hailing from this part of the country, is able to draw dexterously from his first-hand knowledge of the places he depicts. In employing this strategy, Holland places his work in the recognizable domain of Gothic literature – the blurb on the back of the book compares this novel to Emily Brontë’s nineteenth-century classic Wuthering Heights – a genre that has found an influential new life in contemporary fiction in both American (Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy) and Australian literature, as represented by such established luminaries as Rodney Hall and Tim Winton.
Like other reviewers, I found Holland to be at his best when he is describing the beauty and rawness of the landscape. Particularly admirable are the scenes in which he attempts to convey the desolate nature of his setting, especially its utter indifference to its human occupants. In these passages there is a strange sense of sublime peace that pervades the otherwise anxious protagonist, Grey North:
Grey was alone. He swam upstream and sank into the pool beneath the cradling spotted gum root and rested his arms and let the water crash over him. He laughed to himself at this inconsequential, late-night-creek-swimming small-town life. At such times all thoughts of leaving or anything else belong to that still-distant place called the future left him alone. The world still moved slowly at Mary Smokes Creek. At the creek you took in the infinite and nameless changes in the hours, and moving at the same speed as the earth there was not that whiplash of time and the death feeling that came with hours lost unwittingly in degrees of waking sleep. At Mary Smokes Creek there was time for everything, and no desire to do anything at all. (69)
There is a pristine, existential yearning in these passages that feels both authentic and emotionally moving. Here, Grey swims upstream – symbolizing his broader struggles in life – but in his solitude he finds peace and rest. It is in these moments that the reader catches a passing glimpse of Holland’s greater potential.
Unfortunately, The Mary Smokes Boys does not fully live up to this promise, and its flaws are due, in large part, to the weakness of its characters. The novel is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman in which we see the development of its protagonist, Grey North, from a young boy who has just lost his mother to a young man trying to cope with the reality of life in a small town. It has become a staple of postmodern fiction to depict characters that are incapable of transcendence, from Bret Easton Ellis’s grotesquely irredeemable Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to the incorrigibly flawed cast of characters that appear in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. But there is a qualitative difference between these other novels, which satirize the hypocrisy behind the social rhetoric of self-improvement, and the deadly seriousness of Holland’s story, in which Grey repeatedly bemoans the misery of life in Mary Smokes without taking a single genuine step to escape or improve it. For a character imbued by the author with such emotional sensitivity, Grey’s capacity for insight and maturity is strangely limited.
While the inability of Grey to take greater hold of his destiny may be interpreted as a strategic decision on Holland’s part, a deliberate means of exploring the regressive psychology that restricts Grey’s growth into a well-balanced adult, there is no getting around the fact that one of the novel’s most glaring problems is Holland’s failure to invent characters that change and develop in the course of the story. Too often his characters strike a single, uncomplicated note that leaves no room for surprise or reversal. The major characters in the novel are painted in stark, black and white tones, especially Grey’s mother, who is portrayed as a remarkable woman, superbly talented at everything she puts her hand to:
Her father had taught her to speak Irish. She would have amazed her old aunts in that distant country she would never see. She played Bach’s fugues and sang the canticles of Hildegard von Bingen. An Ursuline nun who trained in music at the Brisbane Conservatorium had taught her. Sister Marie Hauswald said no one in Mary Smokes knew how well the girl’s voice carried the great prayers. (25)
The problem with this portrayal is not that she is a good woman, but the way in which Holland overplays these good qualities – Irene North not only learns Irish, but is fluent enough to amaze her Irish relatives were she ever to meet them; she is not only musically gifted, she is the greatest singer in Mary Smokes; her compassion, knowing no bounds, extends to caring selflessly for “Ook” Eccleston, the troubled offspring of an affair between the North’s former neighbor and an indigenous woman; she displays her unrelenting devotion to her children, which culminates in her death while giving birth to her daughter, who is also named Irene in her memory. Simply put, Grey’s mother is depicted as being so saintly that she is not believable as a real human being. This impression is reinforced by her husband, Bill North, Grey’s father, a worthless alcoholic who, in a mirror image of his wife’s fine qualities, fails to possess a single redeeming feature. The novel desperately needs a point of contrast to the predictability of its characters, and it is Grey’s failure to step into this role, even when his instincts tell him that effective action needs to be taken, that made his behavior throughout the novel seem childish and unsympathetic to me.
Such one-dimensional characters also hamstring the plot of The Mary Smokes Boys, which moves from one minor crisis to the next in an episodic manner. Because of the novel’s lack of character development, Holland has to rely primarily on external events to drive the narrative forward. Thus, the novel opens with the death of Grey’s mother while giving birth to his sister, Irene, then meanders through Grey’s wayward youth, the foolish gambling of Bill North that lands the family into trouble, and the fleecing of Grey’s nemesis August Tanner, bringing the narrative through a full circle of revenge and heartbreak. There is nothing organic about the story’s construction, and it is because of this artificiality that the reader is left with no real deep sense of tragedy, only pathos.
For all these shortcomings, there is undoubtedly a germ of potential in Holland’s writing, but for it to flower it must be tempered by an emotional restraint that mirrors the economy of his prose. While there is certainly room for a Hardy-esque reexamination of life in rural Australia in contemporary literature, the tone of disavowed sentimentality that characterizes so much of this story left me feeling cold and disconnected from the characters. What the novel sorely needed was a larger moment, if not of transcendence, then at least of genuine self-awareness on the part of its protagonist that he is trapped in a pattern of psychic regression, a note of contrast to the relentless nihilism that surrounds him on all sides. Without that moment, all the novel’s impressively lyrical passages about the universe’s sublime purposelessness, rather than providing a profound meditation on the brevity of human life, ring somewhat hollow.
PETER MATHEWS is an Assistant Professor of English at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969 and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of two novels, two collections of stories, two books for young adults, and two nonfiction books, one of which, Brother, I’m Dying, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. In 2009, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. Her most recent collection of essays is Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work. She is the editor for Haiti Noir.
from Brother, I’m Dying
Listening to my father, I remembered a time when I used to dream of smuggling him words. I was eight years old and Bob and I were living in Haiti with his oldest brother, my uncle Joseph, and his wife. And since they didn’t have a telephone at home—few Haitian families did then—and access to the call centres was costly, we had no choice but to write letters. Every other month, my father would mail a half-page, three-paragraph missive addressed to my uncle. Scribbled in his miniscule scrawl, sometimes on plain white paper, other times on lined, hole-punched notebook pages still showing bits of fringe from the spiral binding, my father’s letters were composed in stilted French, with the first paragraph offering news of his and my mother’s health, the second detailing how to spend the money they had wired for food, lodging and school expenses for Bob and myself, the third section concluding abruptly after reassuring us that we’d be hearing from him again before long.
Later I would discover in a first-year college composition class that his letters had been written in a diamond sequence, the Aristotelian Poetics of correspondence, requiring an opening greeting, a middle detail or request, and a brief farewell at the end. The letter-writing process had been such an agonising chore for my father, one that he’d hurried through while assembling our survival money, that this specific epistolary formula, which he followed unconsciously, had offered him a comforting way of disciplining his emotions.
“I was no writer,” he later told me. “What I wanted to tell you and your brother was too big for any piece of paper and a small envelope.”
Whatever restraint my father showed in his letters was easily compensated for by Uncle Joseph’s reactions to them. First there was the public reading in my uncle’s sparsely furnished pink living room, in front of Tante Denise, Bob and me. This was done so there would be no misunderstanding as to how the money my parents sent for me and my brother would be spent. Usually my uncle would read the letters out loud, pausing now and then to ask my help with my father’s penmanship, a kindness, I thought; a way to include me a step further. It soon became obvious, however, that my father’s handwriting was a as clear to me as my own, so I eventually acquired the job of deciphering his letters.
Along with this task came a few minutes of preparation for the reading and thus a few intimate moments with my father’s letters, not only the words and phrases, which did not vary greatly from month to month, but the vowels and syllables, their tilts and slants, which did. Because he wrote so little, I would try to guess his thoughts and moods from the dotting of his i’s and the crossing of his t’s, from whether there were actual periods at the ends of his sentences or just faint dots where the tip of his pen had simply landed. Did commas split his streamlined phrases, or were they staccato, like someone speaking too rapidly, out of breath?
For the family readings, I recited my father’s letters in a monotone, honouring what I interpreted as a secret between us, that the impersonal style of his letters was due as much to his lack of faith in words and their ability to accurately reproduce his emotions as to his caution with Bob’s and my feelings, avoiding too-happy news that might add to the anguish of separation, too-sad news that might worry us, and any hint of judgement or disapproval for my aunt and uncle, which they could have interpreted as suggestions that they were mistreating us. The dispassionate letters were his way of avoiding a minefield, one he could have set off from a distance without being able to comfort the victims.
Given all this anxiety, I’m amazed my father wrote at all. The regularity, the consistency of his correspondence now feels like an act of valor. In contrast, my replies, though less routine—Uncle Joseph did most of the writing—were both painstakingly upbeat and suppliant. In my letters, I bragged about my good grades and requested, as a reward for them, an American doll at Christmas, a typewriter or sewing machine for my birthday, a pair of “real” gold earrings for Easter. But the things I truly wanted I was afraid to ask for, like when I would finally see him and my mother again. However, since my uncle read and corrected all my letters for faulty grammar and spelling, I wrote for his eyes more than my father’s, hoping that even after the vigorous editing, my father would still decode the longing in my childish cursive slopes and arches, which were so much like his own.
The words that both my father and I wanted to exchange we never did. These letters were not approved, in his case by him, in my case by my uncle. No matter what the reason, we have always been equally paralysed by the fear of breaking each other’s heart. This is why I could never ask the question Bob did. I also could never tell my father that I’d learned from the doctor that he was dying. Even when they mattered less, there were things he and I were too afraid to say.
A few days after the family meeting, my father called my uncle Joseph in Haiti, to see how he was doing. It was Thursday, July 15, 2004, the fifty-first birthday of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s twice-elected and twice-deposed president. Having been removed from power in February 2004 through a joint political action by France, Canada and the United States, Aristide was now spending his birthday in exile in South Africa. However, the residents of Bel Air, the neighbourhood where I grew up and where my uncle Joseph still lived, had not forgotten him. Joining other Aristide supporters, they’d marched, nearly three thousand of them, through the Haitian capital to call for his return. The march had been mostly peaceful, except that, according to the television news reports that my father and I had watched together that evening, two policemen had been shot. My father called my uncle, just as he always did whenever something like this was happening in Haiti. He was sitting up in bed, his head propped on two firm pillows, his face angled toward the bedroom window, which allowed him a slanted view of a neighbourhood street lamp.
“Are you sure he’s sleeping?” my father asked whoever had answered the phone at my uncle’s house in Bel Air.
My father cupped the phone with one hand, pushed his face toward me and whispered “Maxo.”
I gathered he was talking to Uncle Joseph’s son, Maxo, who had left Haiti in the early 1970’s to attend college in New York, then had returned in 1995. Though I had spent most of my childhood with Maxo’s son Nick, I did not know Maxo as well.
“Don’t you think it’s time your father moved out of Bel Air?” my father asked Maxo.
As he hung up, he seemed disappointed that he hadn’t been able to speak to Uncle Joseph. Over the years, this had been a touchy subject between my father and uncle: my father wanting my uncle to move to another part, any other part, of Haiti and my uncle refusing to even consider it. I now imagined my father longing to tell his brother to leave Bel Air, but this time not for the reasons he usually offered—the constant demonstrations, the police raids and gang wars that caused him to constantly worry—but because my father was dying and he wanted his oldest brother to be safe.
I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents, as well as the borrowed recollections of family members. But the gist of them was told to me over the years, in part by my uncle Joseph, in part by my father. Some were told offhand, quickly. Others, in greater detail. What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t.
—- Citation: Brother, I’m Dying, Scribe Publications, copyright 2007, page 21-26
~~~~~~~~~~
from Create Dangerously:The Immigrant Artist At Work
Twenty-three days after the earthquake, my first trip to Haiti is brief, too brief. A friend finds a last-minute cancellation on a relief plane. Another agrees to help my husband look after our young girls in Miami.
I arrive in Port-au-Prince at an airport with cracked walls and broken windows. The fields around the runway are packed with American military helicopters and planes. Past a card table manned by three Haitian immigration officers, a group of young American soldiers idle, cradling what seem like machine guns. Through an arrangement between the Haitian and the U.S. governments, the American military as leader in the relief effort, has taken over Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport.
Outside the airport, my friend Jhon Charles, a painter, and my husband’s uncle, whom we call Tonton Jean, are waiting for me. A small man, Tonton Jean still cuts a striking figure with the dark motorcycle helmet he wears everywhere now to protect himself from falling debris. Jhon and Tonton Jean are standing behind a barricade near where the Americans have set up a Customs and Border Protection operation at the airport.
Whose borders are they protecting? I wonder. I soon get my answer. People with Haitian passports are not being allowed to enter the airport.
Maxo’s oldest son, Nick, who now lives in Canada, is also in Haiti. He arrived a few days before I did to pay his respects and see what he could do for his brothers and sisters, who had been pulled, some of them wounded, from the rubble of the family house in Bel Air. When I arrive in Port-au-Prince, Nick is at the General Hospital with two of his siblings, getting them follow-up care.
One of the boys, thirteen-year-old Maxime, has already lost a toe to gangrene. Nick was told that his eight-year-old-sister, Monica, might need to have her foot amputated, but the American doctors who are taking care of her in a tent clinic in the yard of Port-au-Prince’s main hospital think that they may be able to save her foot. This makes Monica luckier than a lot of other people I see hobbling on crutches all over Port-au-Prince, their newly amputated limbs covered bys shirt or blouse sleeves or pant legs carefully folded and pinned with large safety pins.
I am heading to the hospital to see Nick and the children when I get my first view of the areas surrounding my old neighbourhood. Every other structure, it seems, is completely or partially destroyed. The school I attended as a girl is no more. The national cathedral, where my entire school was brought to attend mass every Friday, has collapsed. The house of the young teacher who tutored me when I fell behind in school has caved in, with most of her family members inside. The Lycée Petion, where generations of Haitian men had been educated, is gone. The Centre d’Art, which had nurtured thousands of Haitian artists, is barely standing. The Sainte-Trinité Church, where a group of famous Haitian artists had painted a stunning series of murals depicting the life of Christ, has crumbled, leaving only a section of lacerated wall, where a wounded Christ seems to be ascending toward an open sky. Grand Rue, downtown Port-au-Prince’s main thoroughfare, looks as though it had been bombed for several consecutive days. Standing in the middle of it reminds me of film I had seen of a destroyed Hiroshima. With its gorgeous white domes either tipped over or caved in, the national palace is the biggest symbol of the Haitian government’s monumental loss of human and structural capital. Around the national palace has sprung up a massive tent city, filled with a patchwork of makeshift tents, actual tents, and semipermanent-looking corrugated tin structures, identical to those in dozens of other refugee camps all over the capital. The statues and monuments of the unknown maroon, a symbol of Haiti’s freedom from slavery, of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and even a more recent massive globelike sculpture commissioned by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to commemorate Haiti’s bicentennial in 2004—these monuments and symbols around the national palace are still standing; however, their platforms now serve as perches from which people bathe and children play.
Outside the nursing and midwifery schools near the General Hospital are piles of human remains freshly pulled from the rubble. Dense rings of flies surround them. The remains are stuck together in two large balls. I wonder out loud whether all these nursing and midwifery students had been embracing one another when the ceiling collapsed on top of them, their arms and legs crisscrossed and intertwined. My friend Jhon Charles corrects me.
“These are all body parts,” he says, “legs and arms that were pulled out the rubble and placed on the side of the road, where they dried further and melded together.” Sticking to several of the flesh-depleted legs are pieces of yellowed cloth-skirts, I realize, which many of the women must have been wearing.
Across the street from the remains, people line up to watch. One woman pleads with the crowd to repent. “Call on Jesus! He is all we have left.”
“We are nothing,” another man says, while holding a rag up against his nose. “Look at this, we are nothing.”
Jhon is a lively thirty-four-year old who under normal circumstances has an easy laugh. He has been drawing and painting since he was a boy, using up leftover materials from his artist father. Later he attended Haiti’s National School of the Arts, and has been painting and teaching art in secondary schools since he graduated. Even though he is at the beginning of his career, he has already participated in group shows in Port-au-Prince, New York, Miami, and Caracas, Venezuela. Jhon grew up in Carrefour, where Tonton Jean also lives. The epicenter of the earthquake was near Carrefour. A week after the earthquake, my husband and I were still trying to locate Jean and Tonton Jean. Their cell phones were not working and, besides, they were both very busy. Tonton Jean was pulling people out of the rubble and Jhon was teaching the traumatized children in the tent city near his house to draw.
In the tent clinic at the general hospital, I find Maxo’s son Maxime, sleeping on a bench near where Maxime’s sister Monica is attached to an antibiotic drip. All around Monica, wounded adults and children lie on their sides or backs on military cots. Most of the adults have vacant stares, while the children look around half-curious, examining each new person who walks in. I try to imagine what it must have been like in this tent and others like it during those first days after the earthquake, when, Tonton Jean tells me, people were showing up at the little clinic across the street from his house in Carrefour, without noses and ears or arms and legs.
In the tent clinic I say hello to Monica. She looks up at me and blinks but otherwise does not react. Her eyes are dimmed and it appears that she may still be in shock. To watch your house and neighbourhood, your city crumble, then to watch your father die, and then nearly to die yourself, all before your tenth birthday, seems like an insurmountable obstacle for any child.
Even before this tragedy, Monica was a shy girl. When I saw here during my visits to Haiti, she would speak to me only when she was told what to say. The same was true when I spoke to her on the phone. Now in the tent clinic, I gave her in the middle of her head, where her hair has been shaved in an uneven line to place a bandage where a piece of cement had split open her scalp.
Before I leave the tent hospital, the blonde young American doctor who is taking care of Monica gives her a yellow smiley-face sticker.
“She’s my brave little soldier,” the doctor says.
I thank her in English.
“You speak English very well,” she says, before moving to the severely dehydrated baby in the next cot.
My next family stop is in Delmas, to see my Tante Zi. Though it had not collapsed, her house, perched on a hill above a busy street, is too cracked to be habitable, so she is staying in a large tent city in an open field nearby. We had talked often after the earthquake, and her biggest fear was of being caught out there in the rain. I had pleaded with her to go to La Plaine, where we had other family members, but she did not want to leave her damaged house, fearing that it might be vandalized or razed while she was gone.
When I reach Tante Zi’s house, some of the family members from La Plaine, including NC, are there too. We are too afraid to go inside the house, so we all gather on the sidewalk out front, which is lined with tents and improvised showers. It astounds me how much more of Haitian life now takes place outside, the most intimate interactions casually unfolding before our eyes: a girl sitting between her boyfriend’s legs on a car hood, a woman bathing her elderly mother with a bowl and a bucket. These are things we might have seen before, but now they are reproduced in some variation in front of dozens of shattered or nearly shattered houses on almost every street.
I hug NC and Tante Zi and six of my other cousins and four of their children. They tell me about the others. The cousin with the broken back may possibly be airlifted out of the country. The others from La Plaine were still sleeping outside their house but through a contract in Port-au-Prince they had gotten some water. Everyone had received the money the family had put together and wired them for food. Through all this, we hold and cradle one another, and while I hand them the tents and tarp they had requested, I start repeating something I hear Tonton Jean say each time he runs into a friend.
“I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad bagay la-the thing-left you alive so I can see you.”
Bagay la, this thing that different people are calling different things, this thing that at that moment has no official name. This thing that my musician/hotelier friend Richard Morse calls Samson on his Twitter updates that Tonton Jean now and then calls Ti Roro, that Jhon calls Ti Rasta, that a few people calling in to a radio program are calling Goudougoudou.
“I am glad Goudougoudou left you alive so I can see you,” I say.
They laugh and their laughter fills me with more hope than the moment deserves. But this is really all I have come for. I have come to embrace them, the living, and I have come to honour the dead.
They show me their scrapes and bruises and I hug them some more, until my body aches. I take pictures for the rest of the family. I know everyone will be astounded by how well they look, how beautiful and well put together in their impeccable clothes. I love them so much. I am so proud of them. Still I ask myself how long they can live the way they are living, out in the open, waiting.
Two of them have tourist visas to Canada and the United States, but they stay because they cannot leave the others, who are mostly children. NC does not have a visa. She wants a student visa, to continue her accounting studies abroad. She hands me a manila envelope filled with documents, her birth certificate, her report cards, her school papers. She gives them to me for safekeeping, but also so I can see what I can do to get her out of the country.
NC, like many of my family members in Haiti, has always overestimated my ability to do things like this, to get people out of bad situations. I hope at that moment that she is right. I hope I can help. I have sometimes succeeded in helping, but mostly I have failed. Case in point: my elderly uncle died trying to enter the United States. I could not save him.
Citation: From the essay, ‘Our Guernica,’ which first appeared in Create Dangerously, Princeton University Press copyright 2010, pp. 162-169
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Michael Sharkey has taught writing and literature in many universities in Australia and abroad for the past thirty years, and has published over a dozen collections of poems. He lives in Armidale, NSW, and travels between Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia.
John on Patmos
(Hartman Schedel, Poland 1440-1514: Queensland Gallery)
Real estate is wound up here:
where a path spills down to the sea;
no magnificos’ villas encroach:
the fish are allowed to be free.
An eagle, head bent like a quizzical heron’s,
keeps watch as the writer,
inkwell in hand
sits by a Matisse palm tree.
Above, remote, a child on her lap,
a woman’s enthroned on a cloud:
the writer sees no strangeness there;
his head and eyes are bowed
toward the text upon his lap
where stranger things appear:
the world in flames and children
weeping as it disappears.
The Nameless
Dreams grow refined
but hardly appear to get better:
the plot is the same:
the window or door
that silently opens
and two hooded figures
come in through the dark
of the room
to the side of the bed:
the dead siblings or parents
or children approach once again
to steal sweetness from sleep.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brook Emery has published three books of poetry: and dug my fingers in the sand, which won the Judith Wright Calanthe prize, Misplaced Heart, and Uncommon Light. All three were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.
The black hill looks to float straight out to sea.
Cars incline. But the driver’s eyes are raised
to an unvarying wash of night.
For a moment, just an instant, his gaze
is arrested by a tree beneath a streetlight,
a lean, straggly, unkempt bottlebrush he thinks,
and strangely, beneath the light, it is the focus
of his thought. It’s almost two dimensional,
as though it were the section of a tree
pressed between two sheets of glass
for microscopic examination. It stands for nothing
but stands as something, its shapeless branches
and drooping leaves as nondescript
as any failure of a man, any thought
whose time has come and gone and gone again.
He’s nearly home. It’s about to rain,
the wind is getting up and he can sense
an approaching chill. He’ll be home before the storm.
He’s shut the door. Locked the outside
outside. The gathering dark, the gathering cold,
all the unhoused, creeping possibilities,
the distresses of the day, tomorrow’s fears,
wolves howling on the Steppe, hyenas
around the stricken cub, roaches, slaters, snakes,
the tubeworm deprived of light, no mouth,
no anus, dependent on bacteria
to process food, the nonexistent nameless dread
that nonetheless exists with rapists, goons,
gangs of untamed youth, the super-heated words
of presidents and priests, toddlers fastening bomber’s belts,
and stepping out in supermodel clothes, crewcut men
in sunglasses sweeping children off the streets
and banging on the door; the looming nursing home.
The heater’s turned to high. The television
splays its cathode light across the room,
a cup of tea is cooling on the armchair’s arm.
That stupid, ugly tree, he thinks,
the light between its leaves, its immobility,
then the way it twitches in the wind,
what is it that won’t let me be?
All morning it’s been difficult to settle, difficult to harness
energy or purpose for all the things
I have to do. Charged sky,
sudden light at the horizon, grey, then streaks of blue, then
grey again. An unsettled sea,
white water contending point to point,
waves like another and another avalanche, unceasing noise,
sand compacted to a crimp-edged,
man-high bank and I can see,
then can’t locate, a buoy like a white-capped head
sinking and floating in the rip,
wrenched from its deeper mooring,
now driven in, now swept back out, tethered there
by net and anchor that, for now,
have new purchase in the sand.
Conceivably, should I be silly enough to surf tomorrow
it could be me entangled, drowned:
mistake and misadventure; bad luck.
In Switzerland they’ve flicked the switch and particles
surge round and round a tunnel
in opposed directions preparing to collide
in an experiment to explain how the universe got mass
in the seconds of its birth,
why what we touch is solid.
We stalk the irreducible, the constant speed of light unfolding
though the eye can’t see and the hand
can’t touch such magnitude:
time may shrivel, outrun itself, sag under accumulated weight:
end in our beginning: red shift, white dwarf,
rotten apple on the ground.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Of German-Russian heritage, Peter grew up bilingually in Sydney. MPU First Prize 2009. Third Prize Val Vallis Award 2009. MPU Second Prize 2008. Second Prize Shoalhaven Literary Award 2008. Varuna-Picaro Publishing Award 2009. Chapbook: ‘The Knee Monologues & Other Poems’ (Picaro Press, 2009). First full-length collection: ‘The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems’ (Picaro Press, 2010). Peter grows 103 heirloom apple varieties in Bundanoon, NSW.
Other Flesh
Bare front yard concrete driveway, a single
small frangipani shrivels its furrowed grey
elephant skin near the grey paling fence, up
the red brick steps hot in the sun to the threshold:
now speak. German. Another. World.
Brown linoleum hallway, or is it carpet,
to the dining room. Mother there, or kitchen?
Maybe just the spicy dream-world smells
from an Asian boarder’s cooking,
into the bedroom shared with Omi
where mornings we play ‘I spy’ in German,
the armchair with the polished dark
brown wooden rests that prop
my arm holding up a child’s head heavy
with listening to the white wireless,
the wide glowing dial, little green neon wand
I can move to the unknown reaches
of the unseen world full of soft maternal
English voices telling Argonaut stories,
the thrill of Tarzan’s chest-beat yodel,
Clark Kent closing the phone booth door
followed by Superman’s bullet flight,
the dial against which, listening, I press,
peacefully embalmed in fantasy like a baby
at the breast, my small nibbled thumbnail
to see the warm light
coming through all
that other flesh.
Besuch/Visit
contours in the sand/ konturen im sand
combed wind, wires/ gekämmter wind, drähte
up there at the estuary/ vorne an der mündung
a sudden thought of you/ dachte ich an dich
been there again clawed/ wieder da gewesen verkrallt
into branch moss/ am ast das moos
dragonfly wings about the heart/ libellenflügel ums herz
lightless/ lichtlos
Resumé
bröckelnde bäume der lunge
harzverklebte nüstern
das herz klirrt
die scheibe zerspringt, das messer
dies der tod der luft
crumbling lung trees
resin-gummed nostrils
heart pounding
the pane shatters, a knife
this the death of air
mohnerinnerungen verblassen
hart der strassenrand und gerade
nagle im schuh
möwe grell über der halde
dies der tod der krume
poppy memories fading
hard road’s edge, straight
nail in shoe
gulls livid over the dump
this the death of soil
kein sinken wie Ophelia
ranzige bretter, kellerasseln
das pferd verquollen
zahnlos, gischt
tod des wassers
no sinking like Ophelia
rancid planks, wood lice
bloated horse
toothless, spume
the death of water
im spiegel das gesicht wegrasiert
fern gewinkt, schon ans telefon
fliessend k/w und zH, abgelenkt
lebenslang vom staunen
dies der tod des feuers
face shaved off
in the mirror
half waving from afar
already phoning
running h/c all mod cons
distracted lifelong
from the wonders
this the death of fire
Acknowledgement: ‘Other Flesh’ has appeared in ‘The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems’ (New Work Series Picaro Press, 2010)
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
1981, Sam Byfield has published a chapbook (From the Middle Kingdom, Pudding House Press) and his first full length collection Borderlands is forthcoming. His poetry has recently appeared in such publications as Heat, Meanjin, Island, Southerly, The Asia Literary Review, The National Poetry Review, Cordite and previously in Mascara.
Split Earth
Morpeth’s bulging river and rich
farmlands, the sky heaving itself
down in great drapes.
We browsed the bric-a-bracs
and lolly shops, climbed
an old steam engine and listened
to the rainsong of frogs amongst
the ferns and old stone walls.
The bridge rattled, its heavy presence
hanging on into its second century,
shading the flash of reeds
and river mullet. While the women
drank coffee I walked with Thom
to where the gardens met the river,
took a photo of us, arm-in-arm,
obvious brothers despite our
different hair lengths,
despite his axe man shoulders
and my clean shave. Our eyes
were an identical blue, though
not long since the accident his smile
didn’t reach them, cautious as
an animal crouched in barnyard
shadows, relearning trust; his scars
jagged and red, like split earth.
All this year I’ve carried the photo
with me like a talisman,
watched his eyes and mouth
telling different stories, as if I could
stop the world from hurting him
further, from taking any more
of us too soon.
Escaping the Central West
Out on the flat land, the yellow land,
driving from one country town with
a funny name to another, in the old
blue Cortina, the sun making wheat
of dad’s beard. John Williamson’s
singing Bill the Cat, about a moggy
who loved the budgies and wrens
and ultimately lost his balls.
Sporadic signposts, nothing
but sad little dams, wire and sheep.
One flock grabs our attention—
animated discussion in the front,
dad still refusing to unfold the map
before the realisation sets in that
it’s the same flock as two hours
and two hundred miles ago.
*
It’s a story that’s passed through
the years until how much is real
and how much is myth is hard to say.
We lasted two months out there.
My parents must have fought
like hell, though those memories
haven’t stuck. We headed back east
in the middle of a flood, the whole
Central West beneath a foot
of ironic water. Night time shut
the light out and we drove blind,
just hours of water threatening
to swallow us, to breach
the Cortina’s rust and rivets;
and a storm in Dad’s head
that wasn’t about to abate.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Philip Hammial has had 22 collections of poetry published, two of which were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. He was in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from August 2009 through January 2010.
Affair
We should concern for this affair. Affair
of there ought to be some in kind who refuse to accept
a stand-in (not the first killing that dumped its government)—
white public lovers who dealt as best they could with the spellers
who encroached upon Madame’s overly-ripe sensibilities & were not
in the least bit successful, for, look, there, a naked someone
actualised so close you can smell her as though
she was dead but in fact is still alive, just back
from a holiday in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,
some help here) like one of those debutantes who extract privilege
with impossibly dainty fingers, morsels
tidy, morsels teeming with, Thanksgiving just
around the corner blowing its horn, strutting its turkey, “When
the saints come marching in” it’s Madame who leads them, baton
twirling, bobby socks dream girl, 1954, I wasn’t in that marching band;
if only I had been I might not have come to this: my life
as a fetish not what it’s cracked up to be, can’t just
walk up to someone & ask for a good spanking, call it
one for the road or one for the angels in the fountain who fall
like hail on the replica of my hard-won grace temporarily won
when I took the hand of a gentle killer & we slipped through
the gate, eluding the Big Boys, the thugs who guard
the Chocolate Farm, a bouquet in my other hand (how
it came to be there I’ll never know) for Madame who refused
to accept it, our affair long over she insisted with a smile
that she’d acquired in Egypt, or Senegal, or China (Clarity,
some help here).
Sartorial
I’ll have it—the courage to wear what I kill. It
being difficult if not impossible to say at this point
in the proceedings when I ended up in bed
with the wrong family because my admirers
(that motley crowd) are demanding one of my fly-ups. Molly,
have you seen my wings? Now that I’ve finally mastered
the art of remembering where I’ve left my glasses
I keep losing my wings. At least with glasses
I can see to find them, no more groping around
on the floor on my hands & knees. Wrong, as in family?
Wrong. Wrong as in now that I’m up & away (she found
my wings in the oven where I left them to dry) at 30,000 feet
the oxygen masks have dropped & begun to sway
hypnotically, a dozen passengers in a voodoo trance
dancing obscenely in the aisles & the rest engrossed
in a past lives therapy session from which they’ll emerge
as clean as scrubbed boys for Sunday school. Me,
I’m with the voodoo mob, ridden, as we all are,
by Mami-Wata, the mermaid who, when she’s finished
with me will leave me with a small token
of her appreciation—the courage to wear what I kill.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alan Pejković was born in 1971. He has three university degrees in Sweden: an MA in English language and literature at Gävle University, a BA in History of Religions at Uppsala University, and he holds teaching degree from Stockholm University in English and Swedish language. Presently he works on the last phase of his PhD dissertation on liminal figures in contemporary American novels at the English Department in Uppsala, Sweden. Besides academic work, he works as a freelance writer, translator, and book reviewer. His poetry has been published in Swedish, English, and several languages in the Balkan area. He is also widely published in theoretical and literary journals in the Balkans. For BTJ (a leading supplier of media services in Sweden), he regularly reviews books from ex-Yugoslavia as well as books on literature, language, religions and other similar areas.
Sentimental Street
The memory dropped sharply overnight. A freezing point.
Give me a drop of my old street.
Time haunts me, fills me with doubt.
The image of the aged boys, ruined girls, gardens in bloom.
The image flows backwards, changing prisms, transparent crystals.
I stand at the parking place. I sit at my office. Just a point in time.
The street is still a valid point in God’s report on me.
The street punctuates my future.
My Mistress and I at the sunny Afternoon
I am extramaritally yours, my mistress of the erogenous zones.
I stand in your shadow.
You play the violin, I adore your high heels.
Your stocking blasts a hole in my eyes.
Nylon sea. I am drowning. Whistling wolves in my ears. Air rushes from your mouth.
Enclose me in the space between your teeth.
A Boundary Lover’s Poem
I love your fence surrounding me, your words shutting me in, your staying with me till morning fires build up a wall.
I adore that you contain me, insert me into your love.
You have me inside you like a screaming fetus.
You include me in your collection. You form my boundaries.
You add me to your gallery of destroyed borderlands.
You burn my limits to unrecognizable geometrical patterns.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anthony Lawrence has published twelve volumes of poetry and a novel, In The Half Light. His awards include the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize and the Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize. The Welfare of My Enemy is his forthcoming verse novella. He lives in Newcastle.
from The Welfare of My Enemy ~ a verse novella
A clear blue day in a black time.
I was waiting, then moved on as the alarm
of my pulse went off. I put two fingers
to an artery in my neck to monitor
fear, confusion, anger, apprehension.
Blood responds to being laid open
to all kinds of emotion. A life of trouble.
I studied track work updates, timetables.
I found stations with waiting rooms.
Those with ticket offices I underlined.
I began my search in the lit confines
of the head. I travelled with your name
and age, the looping swirl of your laugh, idiosyncrasies,
your shoulder scar, your habit of shooting the breeze
with strangers, homeless park-haunters, law enforcement
officers, taxi drivers… Wherever I went
I made notes. I left thoughts on a voice-
activated, digital recorder. The worst
thing was, I always returned with a pain
in my side, as if I’d tried to run a marathon –
a stitch that worked its way into my chest
and stayed there, throbbing. As for the rest
of my searching, my need to find out why
and where and when, I made my way
into the world, bypassing imagination
and its litany of scenarios, and I welcomed
the legal, usual, rule-by-thumb-by-numbers-
and ordered systems of engagement until I was over-
come with exhaustion and information. As a last resort
I drove to Mount Victoria, where we’d fought
over where to go for dinner. Who stormed out
and who gave in, who took the blame, who spent
the night with a blanket and a pillow
on the floor, whose blood flowed
faster, under pressure, who did what
to whom, and why did we constantly shout and fight?
I pulled into an old weatherboard
cinema’s car park. I could hear you, turning over in bed
and shouting, so I turned the radio on. I opened
the door and inhaled the pine-
scented air. Was it snowing, or
was it fog in the parking lights, giving another
angle to a thought of approaching snow?
I had nowhere and everywhere to go.
Lithgow, where we’d gathered magic mushrooms
as the prison lights burned into the gloom.
Bathurst, where we stayed in a bed
for three days in a cold white room in a bed
and breakfast. Jenolan caves, where
you abused a guide because her
flashlight kept wandering while she talked.
We were together and apart. We walked
to and from each other. Now you’re gone.
I’ll keep looking for you, but not for too long.
Your memory is the dull, cracked shell
of a list of words: Loving, Wild, Unfiltered, Dysfunctional.
~
The nightjar’s eyes are ajar, the little raven
eyes the ground as if it had been given
landing clearance. A ten year old boy
walks under two birds on his way
to the shops. He does not see them
as he is seen, from a distance, by a man.
A man has been watching two birds
above a small suburban park, the hard
morning light unspooling in his hair. The boy walks
towards the end of his life. The man takes
what he needs. Time is under house arrest.
Two birds leave the scene. As for the rest
of the story, reading between the lines
won’t help. What happened has now gone
to where guesswork turns to grief.
The witnessing birds, the belief
that order can be found where
chaos plies its trade. Terror
can be the sound of departing birds
or a child being approached, then led
or carried away to a waiting car
outside Tenterfield, Wyong or Caboulture.
~
He was into austere Eastern European architecture,
Kraut rock, graphic novels, Elizabeth Taylor,
swoffing for bone fish and baked beans from the can.
He was open, kind, loved animals, box kites, and when
he could, he’d hike into the mountains, camping out
for days. Here is a photo of him, soaking wet
on a cliff-edge at Govett’s Leap. It had been
raining all night. He lived life to the extreme.
He came home with a mountain devil pinned
to his oilskin. His hands were cut and lined
with dirt. He’d fallen as he tried to climb
out of a gorge. Two weeks later, his name
was in the paper. Missing in the Megalong Valley.
The search was on. That was twelve years ago. I see
him where they failed to look, which is where
the track veers left then opens out, under cover
of a canopy of dark, withholding sky.
He’ll not be found. His bones are lichen and clay.