January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (Rupa 2008). Art Matters, a book of art essays, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her fiction and reportage deal with issues of social inequality, environment and gender. Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006), a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus. Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. She studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, for four years before finishing her education in Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali Institute. She received a BA in international relations from Brown University in 1996. She has a MA in anthropology from the New School, NY, and a MA in English Literature from Middlebury College, Vermont.Joshi contributes The Global and the Local, a weekly op-ed, to Nepal’s leading English daily, The Kathmandu Post.
Shelling Peas and History Lessons
“And then? And then?” Sapana asked, six-year-old impatience catching up with the slow pace of thought of an old woman.
“Yes, yes,” said the old woman absently, caught up in a world that was a long time away from this hot, dusty May afternoon. A long time ago, when the mist covered the early mornings, and the ice froze on top of wells. Long ago, when she was still young enough to clamber barefoot on the winding, stony paths of the hills. Young enough to drink the icy water of the springs and let it wash away the pain in her legs. Young enough to nibble the chutro berries from the branches like the goats, and then sit down with a sharp splinter to take out the thorns embedded in the soles of her feet.
Bubu moved easily between these two worlds. This hot afternoon, with the sun baking the tiles of the verandah as she sat in the shade with the six-year-old in her yellow frock, shelling peas together to the distant roar of the traffic. And that other world of brown dust between the toes, the water that sprung out of the hills like a blessing, the echoes of people calling from one valley to the other.
“It was a long time ago. Sixty, sixty-five years ago? Maybe more. I was small then, about eight maybe. Just a little older than you are now. All the little ones would be sent into the hills every morning to search for firewood.”
Sapana dragged a straw mat down from the wall so she could sit comfortably on the scorching tiles. She was the only one at home. Buba and Ama were in the office, and so were all her uncles and aunts. They would get home only in the evening. Her school ended at three pm, unlike all her cousins, who got off at five. Sapana, left alone in an empty house, had finally wandered up to the roof, where Bubu was engaged in endless chores. Bubu, who usually did not say a whole lot, sometimes could be egged on to reveal a parable or ukkan-tukki that Sapana had never heard before. The old woman, with a turban of faded red cloth wrapped around her head, continued to shell the peas. The two green halves exploded under her calloused fingers, pop-pop, like corn popping open in heat.
“The jungles were still very thick then, not like today, where you have to walk for half a day if you want to find a tree,” said Bubu, stretching out her long legs in front of her. She was tall, taller than some of the men in the house. A faded choli was tied around her thin chest. Sapana could occasionally catch a glimpse of a withered breast through the gap in the middle of her blouse, which didn’t close. “I don’t know how the people will manage when those start running out. Anyway, we wouldn’t have to go very far those days. We would fill our patuka with popped corn, and eat that when the sun got hot in the sky.”
“Just popcorn? Nothing else?” asked Sapana. She popped a pea and felt the tender juice spurt out in her mouth. The softness of the green halves turned to pulp between her teeth. She stuck her tongue out to see the squelchy remains.
“When we went to get the firewood, we would take the goats with us to graze, and some of the younger children would drink straight out of the teats. I never did that though. Disgusting habit,” said Bubu, wrinkling her patrician nose. Bubu noticed the empty pea-shells wilting in the heat, and pushed them under the shadow cast by the huge bottlebrush tree. The red brushes hung down in drunken lethargy, filled with the sweet honey hum of a thousand bees.
“Then there were the berries and amla that grew in the forest. The forest floor would be covered with them, we would not even have to climb the trees. Sometimes, if it was the season, we would put some soybeans and peanuts into our patuka too. Ah, those were delicious. You have to roast them over the hadi pot to get the flavor out. Now I don’t even have the teeth to bite them…”
“But you always grind them up and put them in your tea,” said Sapana, pulling out the ragged edges of the straw mat. She now had a long straw in her hand, and she was carefully weaving the two ends into little Os to make a pair of spectacle frames.
“That’s right, Baba. I shouldn’t complain. I have all my cares taken care of.”
There was a long silence as the woman drifted off into another reverie. Her hands moved swiftly, automatically, her mind elsewhere. Sapana’s fingers slipped and slid over the pods, unable to pop them open like her Bubu was doing so effortlessly. She wondered when she would be able to shell like the old woman, when she would be able to pick them up and pop them open with speed and efficiency without mangling anything. When she would not have to rip them open with her teeth, and she could have an entire bowl of round peas without tooth-marks in them. All of the peas she had managed to extract in various stages of wholeness had either rolled into the grass or ended up discreetly in her own appreciative mouth.
She was more a hindrance than help, and she knew it. She also knew that Bubu’s patience was limited. In a short while, she would start getting irritated by either the flow of questions, or the wasteful shelling, and that would be the end of Sapana’s daily dose of both stories and peas. Sapana, with six-year-old wisdom, knew that she had to be judicious in order not to cut off the flow to either of these precious things. So the peas were popped into the mouth with uncanny timing each time Bubu looked away, and the solicitations only piped in when it looked like the old woman was too lost in her own thoughts to notice the prompting.
Bubu tolerated Sapana’s presence, her inquisitiveness, more than she tolerated many other things. The child was her little baba, her darling. She was not a demonstrative woman, and she had strict rules of impartiality towards her nine charges. But there was something about Sapana, who was the smallest and followed her around mercilessly, begging for lumps of sugar and stories with equal insistence, that made her special among all the children she had nursed. Perhaps she was still too innocent, and didn’t yet realize the rules of the world. Perhaps she would grow up to become a cold-hearted woman who would forget old Bubu, like all the other children before her had done.
Nobody even bothered to talk to her nowadays. She was just there, the servant who had been around for so long that people took her for granted, like the giant empty grain-jars in the basement. But Sapana still ran to her with her questions.
“How do you know a spider’s web brings wealth to a home?
“Why can’t Ama touch the loukat tree when she is bleeding?”
“Why is Mami being nasty to Sanuama?“
“Because a spider is lucky.”
“Because when a woman is bleeding she makes the crops die.”
“Because Mami thinks Sanuama is not doing enough work, and that she should stay at home instead of going to college.”
And then the answers, which were not really answers, would elicit more questions: Why is a spider lucky? How can a bleeding woman make the crops die? And why shouldn’t Sanuama go to college if her brothers can? The questions were never-ending, an answer promptly giving birth to the next inquiry, in an unending web of interrogation.
Bubu looked forwards to the times when the little girl would come running up, asking her slyly if she could help with shelling the peas, emptying herself of all of her questions in her head, and demanding to know the old woman’s too. The old woman hadn’t talked about her life for sixty-five years. Perhaps she had mentioned her brother to the woman who came to sell turmeric. It was difficult for her to talk about her life. Nobody had ever bothered to ask her, and she would not have told them anything even if they had asked. Indeed, why should they? But Sapana needed to know.
“What about the tigers? You said there were tigers in the jungle. Weren’t you scared they were going to carry you away?”
The old woman laughed, the laugh instantly turning to a hoarse cough. “The tigers never came near us. We would see them only from a distance; they were as scared of us as we were of them. I know of only one person who was attacked by a tiger, and that was by accident. He was walking at night alone, the idiot. You should never walk alone in the jungle at night, you never know what might happen.”
Sapana held her breath. It was one of those rare moments when the old woman’s mind rambled into exciting territory. She hoped Bubu would not lose her train of thought. Often times, Bubu would decide to stop the story randomly in the middle. Once in a while, she followed her stories to the end.
“He came too near to the cubs. The mother flew at him, and who can blame her. One has to protect one’s children, especially when their father is not around…”
“Did you have any children, Bubu?” asked Sapana.
There was silence. The traffic continued its muted roar in the distance. The koel bird went coo-hoo. Sapana felt a shock of fear at having breached an unknown taboo. Bubu had never talked about her children before.
“Did you?” Her voice muted was with fright, but she pressed on, because she was six and at six one knows only that one has to know, even when it is forbidden to know.
“Uuhuh. Long time ago. I had a son,” said Bubu. Her voice, rough as sandpaper, sounded almost soft.
“Where’s he now? Is he as big as me?” Sapana asked.
Bubu looked at the small figure sitting on the mat, straw frames perched on her nose. “He’s gone,” she replied gruffly. What would her son have looked like at the same age, she wondered.
“Oh.” Sapana felt a rush of pure shame, mixed with guilt. But death was a topic too close to her heart for her to stop wondering. The shame was overshadowed by the desire that had arisen to understand this sudden opening up of the secrets of Bubu’s life. Why had she never told Sapana that she had had a baby? Why had she kept it a secret? She knew it had to do with death, which was shadowy and smelt of old people and brought tears, hushed telephone conversations, and the puzzling disappearance of adults. Her father had not returned home when his great-uncle had died. He had re-appeared, with a shaved head, dressed all in white cotton, down to his tennis shoes, thirteen days later. Old people died all the time, and they were always talking about it right in front of her. But they always whispered when a baby died.
“How did he die? Was he sick like Prerana diju? Will she die too? I don’t want her to die. We were planning to climb the loukat tree when she got well again. Now she’s covered with red blotches.” Sapana imagined her cousin being carried away on the back of men on green bamboo, tied up in a saffron shroud. She quickly wiped the thought out of her mind.
“Now don’t you two go up that old tree. Those branches are rickety. A branch might break and then you would be all set for the next six months. You saw what happened to Prakash, didn’t you?” Bubu asked sternly, waving a bony finger in front of Sapana’s face.
“He said he was Tarzan and he jumped out of the tree,” Sapana said, jumping up from the mat to show Bubu how Prakash Dada had done it. “He was right on top of a branch, and then he started to jump, and the branch went winggg!, and he fell. Like this,” she said, rolling on the floor to demonstrate.
“And broke his leg,” added Bubu.
“He has a white cast on his leg now,” said Sapana. Her cousin’s dare-devil exploit, which had brought him so much pain and popularity, had taken on the status of heroism in her mind. She could not help feeling that she needed a white cast, just like all her other cousins had done before her. Perhaps breaking a bone was like losing teeth. Everybody has to do it, and if you don’t, there must be something wrong with you, she thought.
“Are you planning to climb that tree?” queried Bubu, hearing the admiration in Sapana’s voice.
“Nooo,” said Sapana. I can just climb the tree up to the fork between the two branches, and just sit there, she thought. I won’t jump on the branches.
“Yes? No?” Bubu asked, waving her finger threateningly. “Do I hear a lie?”
“No, I won’t do it,” Sapana said quickly, sensing threats bubbling in Bubu’s mind.
Bubu, satisfied, went back to her peas. “Of course, Prerana’s not going to die, you silly child. She’s just got the measles. Everybody gets it,” she said, wiping the sweat from her brows.
“Did Buba get it? Did Ama get it? Did you, Bubu?” Sapana looked at Bubu, her skin hanging like a soft, washed leather pouch from the bones of her face. It was unblemished, except for two big, black moles next to her lips.
“Sure I did. I got it particularly bad. I had to stay in bed for months,” Bubu said. She remembered the hours of loneliness sleeping in the bed, recovering from sickness. But her grandmother had been there to brew her concoctions, and she had slowly recovered.
“Did everyone in your house catch it? Mami says I mustn’t go near Prerana Diju because I’ll get it, then it’ll pass to everyone, even the baby. Did your son get measles too?” Sapana added.
“No. He was too young to get measles,” Bubu answered.
“So how did he die?” Sapana knew she was going to get scolded very soon, but she had to know. She wet the tip of her index finger with spit and traced an elaborate face with three eyes on the hot tile.
“He died when I came down into the valley.” Bubu’s face, turned slightly away, looked lost in thought.
“Why did you come down, then? Why did you not stay at home?” Sapana asked. The saliva had evaporated instantly, leaving her with nothing.
“Stop asking so many questions. It’s rude. Women should not ask so many questions,” Bubu answered shortly.
“But I don’t want you to be all alone. Where are your Mamu and Buba?” Sapana asked, distressed. She could not believe Bubu was holding back this essential information from her.
“Well, it’s a little too late for me to be having a mother and father, let me tell you.” said the old woman, chuckling. “My mother and father are long dead. They lived in Bhimsen Tole, where my brother is now, and… “
“When is your brother coming, Bubu?” Sapana interrupted. Bubu complained constantly about how her brother did not come to visit her more often. Sapana had been five when she first saw Bubu’s brother. They had sat outside on the bench, talking for hours in low voices. Sapana, running up to sit next to Bubu, had felt uncomfortable, as if she was not supposed to be there. Bubu had turned to look at her with a far-away glance. Sapana knew Bubu wanted to be alone, so she had left, reluctantly. Sapana felt jealous of the brother, who only came rarely but yet got such lavish attention. Bubu belongs to our family!, she wanted to clarify to the brother. But he was so big, and had such a gruff voice, that she decided it was safer not to say it. Maybe he wanted to take Bubu back to the village. Maybe Bubu would decide she no longer wanted to live with them, pack her boxes, and leave. Bubu’s brother, in his long-drawn out drawl, talked about whose land had been bought and sold, whose daughters had gotten married, whose sons had left the village to go to the city. Two days later, he left, carrying a tin trunk filled with clothes that Bubu had bought with her savings.
“Uhh, who knows,” went on Bubu, without pausing. “He tells me he has too many things to do in the village. But he’s not too busy to come down when he needs the money. He was pampered because he was the only son. Not me. I was the eldest among eight.” Bubu shooed a crow that had been hopping closer and closer, head tilted consideringly on one side, eyeing the bowl of peas.
“I didn’t get to live with my parents very long. I was married off to another village seven kos away when I was nine years old. Same age as your Priti Diju. Just two years older than you, my girl.”
“Weren’t you sad about leaving all your friends, Bubu? Did you tell them that you wanted to live at home?” Sapana asked, troubled now. She imagined Prerana Diju getting married and going away to another place seven kos away. She didn’t even know how big a mile was. Maybe it was far away as India, or China, or even farther. How horrible. Then she would never be able to play with her Diju again.
“That would have done me a lot of good now, wouldn’t it,” said Bubu derisively. The old woman had a bite to her that could sometimes scare the children. “It was different in those days. Not like now, where you have all these girls old enough to be the mothers of five babies staying at home. Behaving like children themselves. They have no shame nowadays. All the girls then were married by eight or nine. If one was not married by then, people would begin to think there was something wrong with the girl.”
Sapana did not like it when Bubu got started to get into these frightening moods, when she suddenly became stern and started talking about marrying girls off. The worst was usually when she started singing:
euti chori, mayaki dori, abha kasle lane ho
One daughter, a thread of love, I wonder who will take her away.
Sapana hated that song. She maintained a cautious silence.
“My parents were lucky to find me my husband. He was the son of a rich family. His family was rich, they were. Owned seven cows and hillsides of land,” Bubu reminisced almost triumphantly.
“I’ll be seven in four months,” Sapana reminded Bubu. She wanted Bubu to know that she was too small to be married.
“Yes, that’s right. Seven, or eight? Seven, I think. I was nine when I got married. My husband was older, much older. Twenty-three-years older…”
“Twenty-three-years?” Sapana could not fathom this age difference. It sounded enormous.
The old woman looked at her with something like slightly condescending contempt; an almost benign malignancy. She alarmed Sapana when she became like this, almost as if she would declare that girls should still get married at nine even in these changed times. “We weren’t sitting at home going to school like you, Baba. We got married early. People didn’t look for husbands the same age, as they do nowadays. I got pregnant when I was thirteen.”
“Where’s your husband now?” Sapana asked, trying to change the conversation. She sneaked another pea into her mouth as the old woman turned to get a broom to sweep up the pods.
“The river took him. There was a massive flood, one, two years after we were married. The bridge was swept away. Then the men went down to see if they could re-build it. They say he went too close. There were lots of rocks under the water that you could not really see…”
” Did your Sasu kick you out of her house, like Sukumel did when Daya’s husband died?” Bubu swatted away the little hand that was sneaking into the bowl of peas as if it were a fly. Sapana retreated hastily. The old woman could be deceptive, appearing to be lost in her thoughts when she really wasn’t at all.
“My mother-in-law was a kind woman,” Bubu said reflectively. “Kinder than the rest. She let me live in the house until the baby was born. She could easily have sent me back to my parents house, but she didn’t. Then they thought I would have a better life if I came down to the valley, worked at one of the big houses. So they sent me down.”
“Did you want to leave your village, Bubu?” asked Sapana, anxiously. She wanted to think that Bubu was here because she wanted to be here, not because she had been forced to.
“It didn’t matter what I wanted,” said Bubu, tiredly. “Who would listen to me? But I wanted to leave too. I thought my son would have a better life down here. Old man Astha helped me to get into the Ranaji’s house. Then they sent me here because the Ranaji’s wife didn’t want me in her house.”
“Ranaji’s wife sent you here because she was afraid her husband would want to marry you. Because you were pretty. Ruku told me. She said the wife must have been jealous of you. Ruku said so.”
“Ruku is an old chatterbox,” said Bubu, straightening up and lifting her chin in the air. “She talks too much. When I came here, the eldest Dulahi-saab had just given birth. She couldn’t suckle her own child. She was a princess, you know, and princesses didn’t do that then. She was the granddaughter of Chandra Shamsher Maharaja. I hear the young women do whatever they want nowadays. Feeding children out of bottles. Whoever heard of such nonsense. The women now, they have no sense.”
“Darshana drinks out of a bottle. Will she grow up to have no sense too?”
“No. She’s a bright child. She will have sense. Anyway, they hired me to be the dhai for Mohan-raja. Yes, he was a little baby then. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Now he’s balding, he looks old.” Bubu had been happy at the idea of nursing two babies. She had imagined that the two of them would suckle her together, one on the left, the other on the right. “But they said there was not enough milk.”
“And then?” Sapana held her breath. The peas were all shelled. Inside her closed hand Sapana had a fistful of peas that she had removed from the bowl and which she was saving for later. The old woman usually went inside the kitchen after all the vegetables were done. Would she leave Sapana hanging in the middle?
Bubu ambled around for a bit, then dragged out the comb from underneath the straw mat and started to comb her hair. “So my son had to be sent away. They gave him to Hira to look after. Remember the old woman with goitre who comes here and brings us bay leaves? That was Hira.” Bubu raked the bamboo comb through her hair. “She used to come here occasionally, so the mistress asked her to look after my child for a bit of money.” She stopped to pull out the strands of silver hair entangled in the bamboo teeth. Sapana knew there was no need for prompting. The old woman was talking almost as if she was all alone.
“I remember that last day, holding him in my arms, feeling him breath before Hira took him into her back. She stopped coming to the house after that. I heard she used to come looking for me with the child in her arms, but nobody called me because they thought that if I was upset that would effect the milk.”
The sun slowly dipped down through the purple blooms of the jackaranda trees. A loud clamoring broke the silence as the crows came back home to roost in the bottlebrush branches. “And then?” said Sapana, underneath her breath.
“So then I never saw my child again. I heard he died six months later.” Bubu had found out about the death of her child only two years later. They had told her he was well and thriving. She had asked the mistress to give all of her salary to Hira. Hira later told Bubu that she never received any money, not even the promised stipend. Hira said she gave him all the food she had in the house, but that was just rice, and he couldn’t eat that, and she did not have the money to buy him any milk.
“She said that when he died he was just skin and bones…” Bubu’s face, pure silhouette in the sunset, was fathomless. But Sapana felt her pain, musky and old, curling up like smoke in the evening air.
A pack of street dogs started to howl, cutting through the sounds of the temple-bells. Sapana felt the loneliness in a way she never had before, a sharp cutting loneliness that seemed to transmit from the old woman and seep into her throat, making her heavy from hurting. She wanted to say something to comfort Bubu, but no words came. She waited, feeling the pain, dark blue as the night sky that was starting to descend. Slowly, the old woman picked up the bowl of peas, and walked into the kitchen. A few seconds later, a small bottle filled with kerosene and a wick flickered alight onto the surface of the windowsill. Only then did the little girl follow her inside.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Feather Man
by Rhyll McMaster
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2007
ISBN: 9781876040833
Reviewed by DEBBIE LIM
What repels can often also compel. In Feather Man, author Rhyll McMaster seems to know this as she draws us into the life of Sooky – a girl who is sexually abused by her neighbour in 1950s suburban Brisbane. The story opens with Sooky helping her perpetrator, Lionel, in his chook yard. By the third page, we cannot help but read in growing horror as Lionel commits the violation that will set up the damaging patterns that define Sooky’s relationships in adulthood.
The confronting scene in the chook shed could be a microcosm of the novel’s world. This is a visceral place that’s stifling and grubby, where women rank low in the social pecking order. But it’s also in these early pages that Sooky’s gift for observation becomes apparent:
I saw a pair of chook’s legs walk by my head. Even the chooks acted as if everything was normal… But my thighs looked unusual, the way Lionel had jacked them up and spread them apart. I wasn’t used to seeing them that way. They looked pale and nude, the inside of frogs’ legs, as if they were too unripe to be like that.
This ability to ‘see’ leads Sooky to become a successful painter in later years. Her capacity to find an idiosyncratic beauty amongst the urban squalor is also what allows us to venture into what could otherwise be a bleak setting. One morning, for example, when the adults are still asleep after a night of partying, she goes outside:
I walk out onto the grass in the sloping backyard and bend down. There is much to look at in this close-up world. The heavy dew lies in tiny round crystal balls on the clover. A grasshopper with a green spike extending from its head springs out of nowhere onto my hand. Its mandibles graze my skin. I can feel it eating me…I am queen and king of this region and nothing can harm me.
Ultimately, Feather Man is a novel about self-identity. In Sooky’s case, it’s less the search for identity than a struggle to reclaim the ‘ordinary’ self that was taken from her by Lionel as a young girl. For while her artist’s eye is acute, her heart still knocks to the dysfunctional rhythms of childhood. After breaking off an engagement to a besotted but conventional footballer, Sooky marries her childhood idol, the charming Redmond – who is also the son of her abuser Lionel.
For Sooky, the attraction is primal:
The first and most important thing to mention about Redmond is his burnished hair. It is the colour my father brings up out of mahogany, as he polishes in small oily circles. The fox coat. Deep and rich, active, alien.
But Redmond also turns out to be a cruel narcissist. This becomes increasingly apparent after Sooky marries him and they move overseas so he can forge a career in the London art world.
It could be said that none of the characters in Feather Man are particularly likeable. Even Sooky is not conventionally endearing: she is blunt, obstinate and unpredictable. But it is also her lack of convention that makes her such a sympathetic character.
Neither is Sooky one of the two stereotypes she might easily have been: the victim quietly nursing her wounds or the veering car crash leaving a trail of debris. While she has aspects of both, she is intelligent, resilient, introspective and, perhaps most importantly, has agency. Her dispassionate observations can be blackly funny. For instance, during the first time she has sex with Redmond:
The moment has a flavour of clinical deadness. He has taken off his trousers and his shirt and I see he wears a string singlet. Oh, Redmond, I grieve.
Below the dreadful singlet, in the light from the street, I can see his erection. That looks funny too, a polyp or sea worm waving around in the current. I admonish myself: It is not really waving.
One of the achievements of Feather Man is that, via Sooky’s internal reflections, it explores the complicated and enduring relationship between victim and abuser. It is due to McMaster’s skill that, rather than bog down the narrative, these sections deepen the complexity and our understanding of the issue. With Sooky’s eyes, we see how the beast of abuse wears a coat of subtle shades of grey, how it operates in the liminal zone, where the back fence is ignored and boundaries blurred.
Since its publication in 2007, Feather Man has won the 2008 Barbara Jefferis Award. It remains a relevant and powerful book. I was also happily surprised to discover that Rhyll McMaster’s personal website provides detailed notes on the novel’s development. This includes original sections that were later edited out and even the initial reader’s report by the book’s publisher, Brandl & Schlesinger. It’s a fascinating and refreshingly open look into the author’s creative process.
Readers familiar with McMaster’s poetry (she has published six books of poems) will likely be fascinated to learn that her debut novel incorporates poems from two of her previous works (Flying the Coop and Chemical Bodies). According to McMaster, poems have been re-worked as prose in an ‘attempt at post post-modernism’. Also woven throughout are numerous references to fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
The pages of Feather Man bristle with animal imagery. This is skillfully used to depict humans in all their brutality and strange complexity. Sooky’s father, for instance, keeps a tank of sea horses and anemones. However, his seeming fascination with the creatures reflects his disconnectedness and lack of self awareness:
He liked the idea of horses and flowers underwater. He searched for the ridiculous or the out-of-place, the askew, the left-handed, like himself… He looked at those sea horses with so much incomprehension.
In another passage that echoed vaguely the voice in Nabokov’s Lolita, Sooky likens her susceptibility to Lionel’s attentions as unavoidable as basic cell replication:
Lionel, how I loved you…I was a plate of medium in a laboratory ready for someone to seed me with the bacteria of love. Anything might have stuck. Healthy, unhealthy, fungoid, parasitic. I couldn’t discern between them.
McMaster frequently uses animal similes to describe the characters, resulting in vivid portraits. It also lends a sense of dissociation, a certain fantastical edge. The ultimate beast, of course, is Lionel who is the menacing ‘Feather Man’ of the title. As the name suggests, he looms as a type of half-man half-animal, the childhood monster from the henhouse that eludes capture.
The actual animals that appear in the novel typically don’t fare well under the custodianship of humans. The seahorse tank cracks and gushes its inhabitants onto the carpet, chickens are scalded and disembowelled, while the family cat is put down without warning and perfunctorily replaced. Overall, humans are seen as negligent and with a tendency to abuse power.
In Feather Man, life is a savage place where only the fittest survive. This is a powerful and uncomfortable work that refuses easy rescue. Although self-empowerment through art is one of its themes, in the end this is not a lofty tale. There are feathers on the ground, grit under the fingernails, and a sense that the wolf will always be watching from the shadows. Even so, in McMaster’s hands, there is a strange poetry to be found for those whose gaze remains unflinching.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
EVEN MUTTERS CAN MATTER: TEMPTING STUDENTS
WITH THE TASTE OF BAHASA INDONESIA
DOUGLAS MILES: An Essay On W.S. Rendra
W.S. Rendra who enjoyed several visits to Australia, died in Jakarta on the 6 August, 2009 at the age of 74. I valued a joking relationship with the “Burong
Merak” (= peacock). He delighted in this soubriquet and successfully nurtured his own media image as a youthful cosmopolitan and energetically flamboyant maverick despite the fact that like Javanese farmers, he always went barefooted and usually dressed entirely in their faded black cotton garments anywhere “off- stage” and as a rule when on it. Indonesian thespians who were younger than he assumed that he was my junior. They called him “mas” (= “gold” as well as “big brother”) but categorised me with the dross of “oom” (=“Dutch uncle”). Even so, among Indonesian sponsors of my graduate students, it was he who proved to be the most venerably avuncular and persuasively represented the interests of these sometimes difficult expatriates during his occasional formal visits to the Academy of Sciences (LIPI) with a charmingly elegant (alus) but sartorially flawless (rapi) professionalism. Should I now share the secret that he persuaded me 30 years ago (when Suharto’s junta refused him an exit permit) to smuggle his way an urgent consignment of not-so-flamboyant-black hair-dye? Never!
My disconnection from the internet in recent months because of travel spared me the sad news of the death until his Teater Bengkel (Workshop Theatre) unexpectedly contacted me during mid-October with some of the distressing details. And I certainly was not insensitive in retrospect to the poignancy of my efforts in Europe during the interim to have striven to emulate the characteristic vivacity of Rendra’s own readings of his poetry with my own incomparably ersatz declamations but of course with no mention of his recent passing to any of my audiences. An even greater regret has become my inability to tell him how his work has recently helped me to recruit Western students to the study of his language. But it would be more important to him that teachers who have that responsibility should receive that message in which any doubt they may have that this is so will cease once they have tested the tried and proven pedagogical procedure I exemplify below.
Even so it will be interesting to see whether any of the cognoscenti will gainsay my certainty that Rendra was the most brilliant of the few Indonesian poets and playwrights who managed to emerge from and survive the suffocation of literary creativity for three decades under Suharto’s New Order (late 1960s- mid 1990s). The Smiling General’s regime banned any printing or performance of The Struggle of the Naga Tribe which through the structure of classical Javanese/Balinese shadow puppetry, satirised the royal court in the pseudonymous Astinam (read Indonesia) and hilariously pilloried the Queen (read Mrs Tien -“Ten Percent”- Suharto) as well as her ministers for their vanity, venality and vene …(read the American itches which his dalang, played by Rendra’s wife had all these puppets forever scratching).
His security guard of military police arrested him rather than his assailant when targeted by a bomber while reciting the even more satirical Snapshots of Development in Poetry to the thousands of roisterously applauding aficionados who packed Ismael Mazuki’s roofless Garden Theatre (TIM). His prosecutors had to invoke a special Emergency Law that he had “provoked the attacker to violence” so that it was the terrorist in mufti who walked free while the poet went to gaol … And not for his longest stint … But what gets under my skin even years later, for nine eternally vermin-infecting months.
The former love lyricist’s originality in eliding the idioms with the sophistries of several languagesultimately defied Wordsworth’s (1800) narrowly effete definition that “poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility (sic) and calls for recognition of the genius Rendra evinced through anything- but- tranquil articulation of authentic and indeed uniquely Indonesian cultural and political priorities in Western literary forms. The poems he scripted as critiques of the New Order in his own handwriting for his lively readings from the stage became somewhat more than even the finest examples of that art by his most talented contemporaries (e.g. consider his protégé Emha, the theologically muscular Muslim bard). It was indeed Rendra more than any other of these Indonesian scribblers who transformed the “ho-hum” convention ofCatholic schoolboy elocution at Dutch eisteddfods throughout the colonial Indies into modern Indonesia’s robustly intellectual and iconically political dramatic genre of deklamasi whose magnetism has packed the theatres of Asian capitals and of foreign universities whenever they have delivered to publics and whether domestically or overseas.
Top dissident musicians of the time who were no strangers to the limelights were glad to sit somewhere out there in the darkness before him at home in awe-stricken envy of his command over that ambience. They included glitterati of pop and folk such as Ebiet of country-and-western fame, Mogi Daroessman whom they called the “Neil Diamond of Indonesia” and Gombloh of Lemon Trees. The singers persuaded the declaimers to compose lyrics for them whenever possible as they imbibed the lesson that the thousands of typically illiterate but articulate Jakartans in the surrounding blackness would loudly relish a politically barbed stanza whenever Rendra fired it just as surely as these ghetto-dwellers would flinch at the sharp whiff of a real Betawi curry when a back-alley cook stirred it : just a slight breath of salty blacanserrated the bite which hallmarked its own perfection; no need for these acolytes of Rendra to read some bit of paper like a recipe to savour either; and no need for them to wear footwear to a his recital if the price of cheapest thongs challenged their purchase of a ticket.
My tape-recordings vouch for Rendra’s remarkable propensity to draw volcanically creative spiritual energy from his largely barefooted audiences when he composed some of his most inflammatory verses. He would even create new stanzas spontaneously from behind the lectern amid his fire-and-brimstone barrages at the regime’s catechism of national commitment which prioritised ‘Development’ (Pembangunan) over ‘Freedom’ (Kemerdekaan); and the security of censorship over the public’s hunger to know (see below). During intervals in TIM’s dressing room he was genuinely inquisitive when he asked for someone to play back still-smoking lines he had just uttered but never yet read even to himself so that he could scribble them down notably for the first time and ask: “Did I say that or did you just make it up?” (How I wished I had.)
The specific qualities which constitute Rendra’s artistic greatness also include the many ways with which he transcended cultural differences; for example, with the translingual pun which I understand is an anathema for literary purists. The device helped him (deliberately?) to induce Western novices into an appreciation of Bahasa Indonesia and uncannily to speak that language sometimes before they even knew they were doing so. As a mere taste of this magic, I invite the readers to reflect on at least their own whisper of a few lines which the paragraph after next will borrow from “Sajak Mata-mata”. This “Ode to Spies” enlivens both Snapshots of Development in Poetry (Potret Pembangunan dalam Puisi, Balai Pusaka, 1978) and SOB (State of War and Siege, University of Queensland Press 1979).
Mourners at mortuary gatherings in Australia conventionally request one another to be upstanding and close their eyes to observe a collective silence in memory of the deceased. I propose that we honour Rendra’s memory equally respectfully by the very opposite of silence and with pupils wide open on the world in rousing declamations of what he wrote even when those who are with us are not all Indonesian speakers. Teachers can do no better than follow his example in providing prospective students of Bahasa Indonesia with such tempting introductions as the following to the creative possibilities of lovingly moulding the clay of the language he mined as the basic material for his wordcrafting.
Consider for instance the duplication which is so well exemplified by a word whose root “mata” means “eye” and which in the internationally now familiar “Mata Hari “translates as “eye of the sky” (= “sun”). As “mata2”, the root becomes an expression for “spy” or “spies”. In recent months I have introduced my tributes for Rendra in Europe by drawing attention to that simple feature of Indonesian and then inviting my listeners to participate in an articulation of this poem by quietly voicing the words “mutter, mutter” as a chorus to contextualize my own declamation from a faulty memory of the following excerpts from “Sajak Mata2”.
I recalled that the opening stanza of his handwritten notes of which I had kept a few photocopies somewhere back in Australia, began with an allusion to Indonesian newspaper readers urinating provocative gossip on one another to substitute for the facts which the controlled press denied those in the political hierarchy’s lower echelons:
Ada suara gaduh di atas tanah. (aduh2)
Ada suara pi(s)sing kebawah tanah
Ada ucapan-ucapan kacau di antara rumah-rumah.
Ada tangis tak menentu di tengah sawah.
Dan, lho, ini di belakang saya
Ada tentara marah-marah.
I encourage the continuation of the chant of “mutter, mutter” especially to accompany this fifth stanza about censorship and the expression of outrage that:
“……. Aku tak tahu. Kamu tak tahu.
Tak ada yang tahu..Betapa kita akan tahu,
Kalau koran-koran ditekan sensor,
Dan mimbar-mimbar yang bebas telah dikontrol?
Koran-koran adalah penerusan mata kita.
Kini sudah diganti mata yang resmi.
Kita tidak lagi melihat kenyataan yang beragam.
Kita hanya diberi gambara model keadaan
yang sudah dijahit oleh penjahit resmi.
Mata rakyat sudah dicabut.”!!…oleh… ?
This italicized and highlighted initial line of the sixth stanza translates as
“The eyes of the people have been “ripped out ” (like teeth) …by … ?
And the chorus answers with “mutter, mutter “ which harmonises with the
declamation’s
“………………………………….mata2”
So be it if Auden mused that “Poetry doesn’t (sic) make things happen….”(MascaraEditorial, November, 2009) when decades later on the other side of the globe Rendra’s talents with ball-point and microphone panicked even the most menacing of the New Order’s managers into seriously self-damaging, political miscalculation under the relentless barrage not only of Rendra’s drama but also of his declamations. Peerless artistic qualities proofed them against competitive cover-up of malpractice by the junta throughout the social system. Remarkably, the contribution of this Indonesian scribbler to the cultural heritage of the oppressed in his country has probably become the best evidence which pundits may ever need to marshal that poetry really does matter (c.f. Parini, 2008).
Even if only a few critics (and Auden) never understood that truth as certainly as Rendra did, he has bequeathed future scholars with an obligation to analyse the chemistry of the breathtaking literary and thespian dynamite he used to achieve its realisation during his own lifetime. Ma’afkan kenang2an saya yang begini syukurlah, mas; semoga berpulang dengan selamat!
Doug Miles (Centro In Contri Umani, Ascona Switzerland)
Email: miles.douglas09@gmail.com
REFERENCES
Mascara, (2009) Editorial, November, https://www.mascarareview.com/editorial.html
Parini, J., (2008) Why Poetry Matters, New Haven, Yale UP
Rendra, W., (1978) The Struggle of The Naga Tribe (translated by Max Lane) Brisbane, University of Queensland Press
Rendra, W., (1978) Potret Pembangunan dalam Puisi, Jakarta, Balai Pusaka
Rendra W., (1979) SOB, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press
Wordsworth, W., (1800) “Observations Prefaced to Lyrical Ballads” in Harmon’s Classic Writings (pp. 279-296)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shannon Burns is a writer who lives in Adelaide.
The Translator
I am, you should know, by trade, a translator, which is to say I know several languages, and I can turn one language into another, as it were, so I am no amateur to this, whatever it is, if there is a name for it, which I doubt, since I haven’t come across it, and I have come across a lot of names, in many languages, but not the name for this, to what we are doing, or what I am doing, or what the world is doing with us both, whether we like it or not – and whether or not we like it I cannot honestly say.
I can turn one language into another, yet you, it would seem, have no language at all, you can barely turn your thoughts into sounds and gestures. The best I get from you is your moaning and biting, and the way you wring your hands, if they are in fact hands, since they seem to me to be somewhat like hands but not completely functional.
In any event, you won’t let me look at them closely. Every time I get near enough to study them you move away. If you are in your corner you move to the other side of the room, or you growl, or you foil my attempts in some other way, by sitting on them, for instance, or by screaming so loudly it hurts my ears.
When you scream, I am the one who is forced to move to the other side of the room, which leads me to imagine, sometimes, as I am scurrying away, that I have in fact taken on your body as you scurry away from me, from my desire to see your hands, which are in some sense sacred to you, and untouchable, although you touch them yourself, but always as if to protect them from being touched by someone else, by something else, since you won’t touch anything with your hands, other than yourself, which leads me to wonder whether they are hands at all, since hands are surely for touching, and if they do not touch perhaps they cease to be hands, and if they are in some way misshapen perhaps they cease to be what they seem to be, or seem to attempt to be, although they make no practical effort, but just by looking somewhat like hands, by having fingers and thumbs, and having the general shape of a hand, but never being used as a hand, and therefore doing nothing more than seeming like one – which strikes me as an attempt to be a hand, because it is so close to being a hand, whether it desires to be a hand or not, that it appears to want to be a hand, as if the form itself is the truest gauge of intention, although I strongly doubt it, yet it seems that way nonetheless.
It is as if, in those moments when I scurry away from you, feeling myself to be you scurrying away from me, I finally understand what it is to have those hands, which are not hands. I wonder, at those moments, or to be more precise in the aftermath of those moments, whether you have undergone a similar experience, whether you have taken on my hands while I have yours, whether you have suddenly felt yourself to be inside my body, and whether, for the briefest moment, while I am wholly disoriented and therefore incapable of watching over you, you have been able to speak.
The question of your hands is something we cannot depart from, but we will, for now, at least to a certain extent, although they must always be hovering, those hands, over everything, since without them what else?
What else, other than this, since there must be more than this, because without that what is this?
At least they are better than my eyes, which are nearly blind.
But, there again, how can one compare eyes which do not work with hands that are not, strictly speaking, hands?
It appears foolish, but at the same time strikes me as acceptable, and that seems good enough, for now, for me to depart from all this talk of hands or whatever they are, although they may hover, and let them hover for all I care, for I have cast them away with my eyes, which do not work very well, but whose mention at least has this power, so let that be the end of that.
The real question is as follows:
If I am to be you, it seems to me that I am, as a result, in a sense, to embody you, but which you? You have not yet, in truth, been allowed to speak, despite my speaking for you, as you. In truth I speak despite you, as well as for you, and with you, and because of you. In truth you are my speaking, and yet you are dumb, utterly.
For the most part you shuffle from side to side, instead of speaking, which is to say you walk in a strange way, if one could go about calling such a thing, as your gait, a walk. It is more like a dance, but without rhythm, or flow, or balance, or anything resembling the joyful expression of bodily movement. Instead you gait. There is no other way of putting it.
I have considered purchasing footwear, within which you might steady yourself, or seeking podiatric or chiropodic stimulus, in the sense of diagnosis and treatment and healing, or of teaching you to walk differently, given your lack of balance, or disease.
I say these things, I confess, as one might whisper prayers in the face of an abyss, against which we are thrown, so to speak, with little more than our selves, our basic parts, our meager substance, to subsist on. But you are not an abyss, by any means, my dear, or at the very least not merely.
If you are, as they say, enigmatic, a thing to puzzle over, a wound, let’s say, an opening, let’s say, then you are not quite an abyss, but rather an opening into flesh, with its definite tissue, its intimate warmth, its assent by touch.
Because this is the crux of the matter: I have felt your assent.
That is to say, you have said yes to me, but it was a yes, a trust, consisting entirely in touch, in touching your body with my fingers, although it’s true to say you withdrew from me in that touching, but you allowed it nonetheless, even though you were not completely there, since you seemed to take refuge in some other place, some place demonstrably inside you and therefore, I might add, bodily.
You were not there, you said yes to me. This is what I am getting at.
Perhaps you will be able to enlighten me, later on, when you have taken up some form of speaking, when you have become, in a sense, speech itself, of the place into which you withdraw. Is it a place of the past? Or is it a still place – a sanctuary, let’s say, against time, in which things are wholly unfamiliar, as a landscape in a different world, given other predicates, attuned to different sensibilities, like, for instance, a gentler form of gravity, or a porous light.
Perhaps it is a place inside you, and if I am, in fact, to draw you away from it, in a sense, with this language, to give you tools for containing it, and constituting it, and re-constituting it, then it seems to me I am doing something bodily, something concrete, and acquiescence to such a thing can only be given as touch, as I have touched you, and discovered your withdrawal, at the same time as your assent, which is at the very least an assent to something, though it only be my presence there beside you, with my hand on your mouth, covering your lips, that you might speak.
Your lips said yes, without speaking. This is how I’ve interpreted it.
There is a risk involved, undoubtedly, but if you were only there, as you are now, as you read this, then you would understand my response to your lips, as you are now, as I write this.
You are asleep.
Something in the writing of this, while you are asleep, is a digression from the ordinary work I have taken up, of becoming your story, so you might be told it from my mouth, in return, and this digression speaks of something else, something I am not entirely comfortable with in this process.
It is this.
I was leaning over you, earlier, and in a sense conjuring something, something concrete, since the feeling had crept over me quite overwhelmingly the night before, and was being repeated at that moment, earlier today, that I was in need of your touch, and that your touch, your skin, might not be entirely relied upon, and there was something about this idea, which I couldn’t put out of my head, as I lay there in the dark, last night, which I could hardly endure, which threatened to tear away at something, something altogether necessary, the loss of which would leave me utterly disrupted, let’s say catatonic, completely destroyed, erased from existence.
Yet the next day, today, I touched you, and your flesh said yes, or if it wasn’t a complete assent it was at least a partial one, since your flesh said yes to me, yes, I am here, even as you withdrew.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Andy Jackson lives in Melbourne, Australia, and writes poetry exploring the body, identity and marginality. He has been published in a wide variety of print and on-line journals; received grants from the Australia Council and Arts Victoria, and a mentorship from the Australian Society of Authors; and featured at events and festivals such as Australian Poetry Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Newcastle Young Writers Festival and Overload Poetry Festival. Most recently, he was awarded the Rosemary Dobson Prize for Poetry, and is currently a Café Poet in Residence for the Australian Poetry Centre. His most recent collection of poems, Among the Regulars, is scheduled for release by papertiger media later in 2009.
Ghazal
Why do you smother your soul in that fist still?
This wound will open and heal itself – just sit still.
Sheer will’s not enough. Floating past like dropped pollen –
all these tree-borne thoughts your intellect has missed, still.
The country doesn’t care for you, the earth craves your bones.
All your machines will only make you an atavist. Still,
who are you but your tics and eruptions, your prosthetics
and open holes? A flower is much more than its pistil.
Sand is not ground but a crowd. The ocean knows this.
However bitter the wind, the shore must still be kissed.
Press your thumb into these bruises, your forehead
to the earth, and face the unbreakable tryst. Still
water? A trick your mind plays, persuasive as a mother
tongue or god. Beyond the city’s grid, thick mist still
waits in the deep valley for your water-logged body.
Dream of becoming bread, oh grain – you are grist, still.
Not the smoke or the wick or the shadow on the wall,
moth, but the flame, which cannot exist if still.
Something else
Since the door was locked, I’ve learnt so much.
A face can feel the sun yet forget what it’s for.
Bars obscure the world, shrink the room
to stand up, take a few steps. Legs buckle
under the weight of a body with no soul.
At intervals I’m fed, given medication. The walls
absorb the smell of those who arrived and left.
Only the press release escapes.
I have no desire to lash out. The voices are calm
and impersonal – the risk to the public
still not low enough. These wings
are withered and pecked to the bone
and see the future, like the sky, is an open
lie. Everything is a weapon.
Refusing food, speechless, I speak
the only dialect left. Outside are people
who say they wouldn’t treat an animal like this,
their faces averted like statues, ideal humans.
My life depends on us becoming something else.
Comfortable
My instinct’s to curse myself –
the shore is a wall of fire, my city sings
its people into fuel, the rotten pillars
of the jetty creak their warnings, while
this boat of bones tugs at its moorings.
Yet each rope I approach with the knife
has become a throat my heart can’t cut.
Instead, alone, at night I pace the hull
and scrutinise each knot – these twisted
lines, old stories which hold me here,
a half-brave face raised, my fear
the sea could be a mirage.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Johanna Featherstone is a Sydney-based poet and founder and Artistic Director of The Red Room Company: www.redroomcompany.org.
After the Funeral
Family space vibrates with Grampa’s past effects;
to the left shoulder of an elegant desk, a square
gold frame holding the smile of his son,
dead at twelve year’s old. Toiletries, wallet things,
collected from the hospital, weigh down the single
bed that recently held his butterfly body.
On the dresser, pollen flakes from a posy of blue
cornflowers, pulled from their garden plot.
Dust particles through light, fuzz forms atop
rubbish bags, packed with his clothes, for the tip.
The Fernery
Ferns shroud the bench where I sit.
Each frond settles in its own moist corner,
a rivulet trickles beneath the simple teak bridge.
Moments grow. Then your shape enters the
miniature jungle. Our bodies cowled in vines;
plants and ants witness our licks, until tourists
with cameras snap open the yielding bodies –
and we run from the radiance, leaving behind
(for next time)
the filtered light and vanishing faces of mist.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Franz Wright, the son of poet James Wright, was born in Vienna in 1953. During his youth, his family moved to the Northwest United States, the Midwest, and northern California. Wright’s most recent collections of poetry include Wheeling Motel, where the poem "Night Flight Turbulence" appears. Past collections include Earlier Poems, God’s Silence and The Before Life. Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) received a Pulitzer Prize. Wright has translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born and brought up in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, Usha Kishore now lives on the Isle of Man, UK. Usha was educated at the University of Kerala (India), Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and Canterbury Christ Church University College (UK). After having taught for some time in the British Secondary and Tertiary Sector, Usha now teaches English at a Secondary School on the Isle of Man . Usha’s poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Ireland, Europe, New Zealand, India and online. Some of her poems have been translated into German, Spanish and Gujurati. She also writes critical articles for international magazines. Her poetry has won prizes in UK competitions and has been part of national and international projects. Her short story “Dowry” was shortlisted for a major UK literary award, the Asham Award (UK) in 2005. Usha also translates from Sanskrit; her translations of Sankara have been published in India, the UK and USA. She is now translating Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara, in conjunction with Dr.Rati Saxena of Shree Shankaracharya Sanskrit University, Kalady, Kerala.
For The Dynasty Of the Moon
(after reading Kylie Rose)
For the dynasty of the Moon,
A hundred thousand lives lost
in verse…
Metres of battle scanned into
Krishna’s eternal song –
A stoic sage chronicles the
end of his own dynasty –
a patient elephant God scribes
into eternity…
In the Vela kali of yesteryear’s
setting sun, I hear the battle cry of
the lone sun-warrior, who challenges
the house of the moon.
Panchavadya notes echo
into twilight memory –
The raga hindola, mourning the death
of the lone young warrior killed
by deceit. Arjuna takes a terrible
vow and Krishna smiles in the
bugles of Panchajanya, while a
lone monkey mediates on the flagstaff…
From the carvings on the temple wall,
she, with unravelled hair, calls out to my
soul from stone – screaming revenge for
the disrobing of womanhood….
Krishna’s eternal song – The Hindu “Gita”
Vela kali – Temple art (dance) form
Panchavadya – five instruments played together
Hindola – a raga in Carnatic music
Panchajanya – the conch of Krishna (The poem is based on the Hindu epic Mahabharatha)
Nikhat’s Mother
She stands out in a crowd –
Her shocking pink
dupatta carrying
songs from the Gilgit –
She is without
a language here –
I am her interpreter –
translating her
language, her culture
her colour–
She does not understand
why Nikhat has to attend
school daily – Nikhat is at
her sister-in law’s cousin’s
wedding in Bradford–
Today is Mehendi, tomorrow
is the Nikah and Nikhat will
not be in school for a week –
She does not understand
why Nikhat is harassed
by school bobbies –
Bibi jaan, taleem lena,
dena hamara mamla hai –
Ye gore kyun dakl dete
hain?
Biting back half-an hour’s
exasperated laughter,
I interpret to the irate
Head of School:
Nikhat’s mother does not
understand the concept
of compulsory education…
Mehendi – The henna festival before marriage
dupatta – veil/scarf
Nikah – Muslim Wedding ceremony
The Urdu dialogue can be translated as: Madam, education is our personal business, why are the whites interfering?
Gilgit – a city in Northern Pakistan and is the gateway to the Karakoram ranges of the Himalayas.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born in Warsaw, Poland, Zuzanna Nitecka left her home country in June 2008 to seek inspiration under the palm trees of Spain. Her greatest inspiration is the magical world of Richard Brautigan’s imagination. She is currently living in Madrid, writing, wandering around at night and making friends with struggling musicians. And teaching English in her free time.
After
You get on the train at 6:45 giving off waves of afterlove frequency.
There is a glow under your skin as if you had dozens of very small Christmas candles in your belly. You stand out against the cold fluorescence of the metro. Eyes turn to follow you as you pass by in search of a seat. You sit down, oblivious: perhaps you pull out a book from you bag or sip tea from a green thermos. All the while. The car gradually fills up with your mind that is aglow.
Loss
There’s nothing more sadly sensual than after-rain pine trees stuck into earth like paper umbrellas dropped into a cocktail glass.
As I walk under dripping branches, thinking my thoughts, I see a black scarf on the concrete path before me. It belonged to a woman. She wears heels and perfect make up. Sweet perfume. She is afraid of growing old. The wind must have untangled the scarf from her shoulders. She walked all the way home from this little park with the ghost of the scarf wrapped around her neck. Before she realized it was gone.
Concert
The clanking of pots and pans drowns out the music (a sonata of practicality). She brings out the dinner: rice in asparagus sauce. As the music begins, she will fidget. Thinking about plates that should be washed; drinks to be served; stains on the tablecloth. Meanwhile, the musician plays
as if he was taking revenge on the world. To avenge some terrible grievance. Then. The trembling of strings announces it’s over. In the silence
that comes, a question: “Will you help me clean up?”
(…)
The demon of disturbed sleep
broods
in bright daylight
(…)
A hudred years ago, it was 7 am. Beds rocked softly
on cold floor like empty peanut shells.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nandini Dhar’s poems have appeared or is forthcoming in Muse India, Kritya and Sheher:Urban Poetry by Indian Women. Nandini grew up in Kolkata, India, finished her M.A. In Comparative Literature from University of Oregon, and is now a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at University of Texas at Austin.
inking the hyacinth
knowing how to make
the rosemary smell
like thyme is not enough.
her brother told her. with a touch on her forehead,
which, he thought, would reassure her. if she really
wants to be the kabiyali she thinks she is, she must
learn how to make pearls from inside her spleen.
and that, he said,
requires perseverance.
amongst other things.
not yet ready to give up, she spent days
sorting through spine splintering brick.
looking for the right kind of dust.
holding the specks
against the sun with
her three fingers.
the other two craving for shades of green
she had never hoped to touch. then, once
she had them all, she swallowed the dust
drops. one by one. every one of them. not
noticing that her forehead now bears five
glowing blue spots.
exactly on the places where
her brother’s fingers touched her
cantaloupe skin.
probably because, she wasn’t feeling anything there.
almost in the same way the leprosy skin fails to notice
the prick
of a pin
on itself.
in the bread-colored desolation of a machete moon,
she had to admit that her brother did not want her
to pull out her eyes one after the other and serve them
to him in crystal jars.
marinated in lemon juice, rock
salt and cinnamon flakes. neither
does he want her to spend the day
sweeping speckless the ground under the guava tree
but, being just back from turning an oyster princess
into a porcelain-doll, he believes his assurances can
turn all silhouettes into full-blown
statuettes. she, on the other hand,
would rather scratch the oyster-shells
hard and let the blood dry under her broken nails.
blood, when allowed to harbor chaos on its own, can
become a bladed verb which will pierce a bone right
in two. yet, eager to regale in his desperate certitude,
she gave up the bristles,
the blood,
bones and the blades.
for thirteen years, three months and three days, she made
the hyacinth leaf her bed. fed on air. and woke up every
morning to throw up spit the color of deep brown earth
and sunlit scar tissue. which she would then use to sculpt
rabbits, deer, sparrows and hedge-hogs.
and once she crawled back
into her hyacinth bed, her brother
would break them all. one by one
too ordinary, he would say, with an expert frown. the morning
she spat the pearl out, her brother held her head, picked up
the pearl stone, and after looking at it for two whole minutes
through purple tinted field glass, said, sissy dear, you are yet to learn
the art of madness wild. it was then that she smashed
the pearl on the rock. collected pieces
too pink. and wrapped them up in
her rainbow-skinned scarf, walking off
towards her hyacinth-shield. needless to say, no one
saw her ever again. Nothing much happened to her
brother either. only the white hyacinth flowers, in
the lake, turned fluorescent violet. and on full-moon
nights, they bleed red. routinely. ritually. without fail.
irreconcilable:lines for virginia mem-sahib
My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. […] A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever.
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
since 1835,
when abhinavagupta, shudrak, and rumi were forced to sit
tight-packed on a single shelf, leaving the rest of the world to alphabets
that jumped out of ships and judge-sahib’s wigs, textbooks have perfected
the art of making crazed scribbling-chicks look tame.
tame enough to be tapestried into buttercream muslin pillow cases
tame enough to be painted on jasmine-white schoolroom walls
tame enough to be talked about without once referring
to that conch-shaped nose of yours
the look in your eyes, which says,
i am perfectly capable of drenching myself
in the purple-blue of a drizzly-day sun, claiming, the sun
belongs to me and only to me, and can,therefore,
be swept away, into the abyss of my purse,
just like the peacock-feather of my hat.
my tongue was daffodil-bruised.
the little man made me peel oranges
for eight hours every day, my ass on wood,
the tip of his beard brushing off the last traces
of elizabeth, mary, all those poet-girls who walked straight
into the smoke-filled coffeehouses, corsets tightly folded into eight
in their armpits.
hell,i didn’t know that even sammy dear
had waved off the sugar-bowl with the back of his left hand while pouring
out a full dose of white guilt in the wings of albatross
so, i held on to your lonely sun. although,
for my own sake,i would have rather opened my lips,
tongue,limbs and nipples to the storm. yet, there are days,
when i craved for a share of your sun, with bleeding fingernails
and all.
you were running,
your skirt hitched up to your knees,
from the very old man
with scissors for clipping the wings of women
who build abodes other than the ones thrust upon them
by holy matrimony.
i was running right beside you,
trying to figure out the color of the thread of your hems.
i would have given anything for them to be the shade
of clotted blood, rust, deep-fried, well-breaded mutton cutlet.
and there was mary beton.
bombay.the horse. the fall.
five hundred pounds a year. a room ensured.
damn it, girl, i couldn’t care less
for your aunt beton or her fall. but I did care
for the five hundred pounds, which, had they
stayed behind, could have been used to build
my own room. Or, for that matter,
one for my sister
one for my cousin
one for my aunt
one for my mother
one each for my father, brother and uncle.
ginny dearest, i don’t trust you
with the carving of my wood.
for all practical purposes, you’re just
another mem-sahib.
nothing more.