Fernanda Dahlstrom reviews Gentle and Fierce by Vanessa Berry

November 30, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Gentle and Fierce

by Vanessa Berry

Giramondo

ISBN 9781925818710

Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM

Gentle and Fierce is a book of essays that provides glimpses of Sydney author Vanessa Berry’s life by dissecting her encounters with non-human animals in various contexts – in the household, in captivity, in art and in the form of ornamental objects. Through Berry’s encounters with animals, we piece together her life as a city-dweller and an intellectual, a solitary who is as much an observer of other humans as of the animal world. Her essays allude to the destruction of the natural world and the marginalisation of other life forms by humans as Berry strives to connect with nature despite a paucity of opportunities to do so. 

The author begins by sharing that her first name means ‘butterfly’ and that knowing this as a child ‘attunes you to their presence’ (p.7). She recalls expecting adulthood to be ‘a time of emergence, as if from a cocoon, into a life where I was colourful and unconstrained’ only to be disappointed at finding herself, in her twenties, ‘still as ponderous as ever, given to reticence in social situations and to slinking away alone’ (p11). The author’s introversion is a recurring theme. As a child she realises that the ideal is to be extroverted; instead, as a young woman she thinks of herself as a spider, eavesdropping on the conversations around her and writing down lines in her notebook, ‘Every detail stuck in my web.’ (p.125)

Berry repeatedly evokes the folly of humans. The notoriously aggressive myna bird was introduced in the nineteenth century to control the insects in crop fields, only to prove more interested in eating the produce itself. She reads of how palm oil, paper and rubber industries are affecting Sumatran forests, the habitat of tigers, prompting her to reflect:

As I look over the list these substances seethe around me, the pantry dribbling palm oil, the papers dusty and yellowing on the shelves. The rubber soles of shoes sit heavy in the depths of the wardrobe. Outside, car tyres crackle over the road. (p.20)

In ‘Rabbit Island’ she recalls visiting a Japanese island that serves as a sanctuary for rabbits in the months following the Fukushima disaster. The essay alludes to the issue of vivisection but does not delve into it, instead tracing the theme of rabbits in her own life, recalling a pet rabbit, which people joked was edible. She writes:

That was difficult for me to understand. Having been a vegetarian for decades I made little distinction between food animals and companion animals in terms of what kind of soul they might or might not have. (p.53) 

In this way, Berry’s observations about the reprehensible attitudes and behaviours of humans towards the animal world are made in a way that is restrained and non-didactic. She implicates herself in her criticisms of the mores of human social life, where animals are relegated largely to museums and fairy tales as she lives a life where animals play a largely symbolic and abstract role. Her childhood memories of animals are not of wild or even domestic creatures, but of the badger and the toad in a story and a stuffed bear in a museum exhibit. She describes various kitsch representations of animals: porcelain figurines of horses, dogs and cats, a glass fish, a polystyrene bear and a ceramic crocodile, and acknowledges, ‘it is difficult to reconcile their abundance as mascots, toys or decorations, with knowledge of how their real counterparts have been affected by human encroachment on their lives and habitats.’ (p.104)

‘The Fly’ strings together a series of anecdotes from her life using the presence of flies as the organising principle. A reference to a fly’s buzz in an Emily Dickinson poem read in the late 1990s. A fly alighting on her hand, while listening to a talk by Elizabeth Jolley, preventing her from raising the hand in response to a question. A fly buzzing around an acupuncture clinic and another one crawling across a pub table. The ubiquity of flies during a bush fire season. 

Some of the essays tell stories whose connection with the animal under consideration is tenuous. In ‘The Word of a Snail’, Berry reflects on her lifelong love of the work of Sylvia Plath and relates the experience of visiting the poet’s grave, where messages written to her by fans were being crawled over by snails. Just when anecdotes like these are starting to feel glib, Berry plunges us into the horrors of the 2020 bush fires which killed over a billion animals with ‘Animal Chronicle II’, which was for me the highlight of the book. In that essay, Berry imagines, amidst the inferno, ‘a dystopian world of only cities and burning forests, where animals were extinct or rarely seen, only to be remembered through objects’ (p.155). But just how much imagining is required for this scenario? This dystopia seems to be exactly the world that we have been reading about, where humans fetishise cute representations of animals while remaining either oblivious to or uncaring of what is truly befalling the animal world. 

Curiously absent from Berry’s selections is any mention of the practice of factory farming, in which billions of animals are mutilated and slaughtered for profit every year in what has been called ‘the animal holocaust’. Nor does she mention the fact that the majority of mammals on earth are now livestock and the vast majority of birds, farmed poultry, an omission so glaring that it must be deliberate. Perhaps the absence of any discussion of these facts is a reflection of the lack of awareness of or attention to these issues in most echelons of human society. Unlike the ornamental, domestic, taxidermised and wild animals to which Berry dedicates space, the victims of factory farming are out of sight and out of mind.

However, Berry does explain, in ‘Animal Chronicle II’, what is termed ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, the phenomenon of each generation taking its own youth as its point of reference for ecological diversity. In this way, she joins the dots with her earlier essays, many of which dwelled on the presence of insects and other critters during various scenes of her youth. How many of these mundane experiences will future generations share? 

Gentle and Fierce is a quiet but absorbing and thought-provoking work that approaches relations between humans and animals from many angles. Berry’s writing is languid, evocative and highly literate and the generous sprinkling of literary references is one of its most appealing features. Each essay is illustrated with a drawing of an animal done by the author, who is also an artist and zine maker.   

FERNANDA DAHLSTROM is a writer, editor and lawyer who lives in Brisbane. She completed a Master of Arts at Deakin University in 2017. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Overland, Kill Your Darlings and Art Guide.

Izzy Roberts-Orr reviews My Friend Fox by Heidi Everett

November 28, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

My Friend Fox

by Heidi Everett

ISBN 9781761150159

Ultimo Press

Reviewed by IZZY ROBERTS-ORR
 
 

At night, I can hear the foxes screaming. Nothing is wrong, this is just what they do, particularly during mating season. The first time I heard it, I thought something was seriously wrong – that a small child was being chased through the bush, or that I was at the epicentre of a B-grade horror movie. That I might be next. There’s always something a little disconcerting about seeing a fox on this continent. They have been here longer than my ancestors, but they don’t belong here either. Introduced in 1855 for ‘sporting purposes’ (i.e. ‘to be hunted’), foxes had become rife across the mainland within just 20 years.

My Friend Fox begins and ends with a fox. The book opens with a Tswana proverb, “Phokoje go tsela o dithetsenya!”, and while the author’s connection to Botswana is not clear, the translation and sentiment carry throughout the book. “Only the muddy fox lives!” – or in other words, you must rough up your coat and get a little dirty to truly experience life. Heidi Everett grew up in fox country, in a village in the Welsh countryside, and is keenly aware of how misplaced the fox is in our environment – that, “here in Australia, they arrived without ancient ancestors inviting them onto the shore and they will never be welcome.” (116) They are beautiful, and they are highly destructive to their environment. This duality makes a fox the perfect metaphor to carry Everett’s story of surviving trauma and mental illness as, “just like my psychic distress, he is a symbol of both disease and determination, of a curse and of hope.” (p. 176)

Part memoir and part parable, My Friend Fox is Heidi Everett’s account of her experiences within the mental health system and her path toward learning to live authentically. The first scene in My Friend Fox brings us into the world of the psych ward, which is populated with staff and psych patients, and pigeons who watch the, “strange birds in the psych ward cage.” (p 14) There is a particular texture to the stretch time can take on when you’re unwell. Time can feel like it’s sped up, hyper galactic light speed paces, or like soup but stretchy. Everett writes, “The meds make me sleep too much and, for some reason, night-time becomes daytime. Someone once told me that it’s known as schizophrenia-time.” (p 53) My Friend Fox echoes this unmooring, and follows a narrative arc that is episodic rather than linear. The early chapters of the book look at the dehumanising experience of the psych ward – Everett is no longer seen as herself, she is, “psych patient number 25,879* (or part thereof). Age 24. Primary diagnosis: schizoaffective. Comorbidity: major depression, juvenile autism. Seems to enjoy music, art. No dependents. No further use for a name.”  (p21)

Interspersed between accounts of Everett’s experiences in the psych ward, the book traces her experiences growing up in the Welsh countryside, in a, “300-year-old stone cottage sat at the last stitch on the hem of a tiny village on a sliver of road between two country towns.” (p43) then transplanted to Doveton. Everett is relentlessly bullied throughout her schooling, and finds more comfort and a sense of self in the company of animals than with people. Her experiences of social isolation are compounded by a family who were, “an island on an island surrounded by moats of jagged rocks and raised drawbridges.” (p40) Everett takes a compassionate view of these circumstances however, seeing the stretch of her inheritance as, “no fault or gift of my parents, but just like any diverse ideology, our tribe tasted the earth a little differently from that of the meat-and-three-vegetables kind. We were a bowl of bananas.” (p45)

Living with mental illness can mean being cast as an unreliable narrator of your own experiences, or feeling as though you exist in the spaces between gaps in your own memory. Whether because of existing in altered states, or through the memory loss that can be a common side effect of many medications used to treat various forms of mental illness, having access to your selves over a span of time can be a real challenge. What may exist of these periods are the testimony of others – of case files, doctor’s notes, and what the people around you are able to tell you. Something Everett balances incredibly well within the text is a commitment to the truth of her own reality, whilst also understanding the points at which her experiences diverge so far from the reality of those around her as to be detrimental to herself and others. Everett’s experiences are drawn with a fine eye for detail, and though her depictions of the psych ward are as starkly fluorescent-lit and brutal as the space itself; heart, poetry and humour are hallmarks of this book, despite its dark subject matter. Even in bleak moments her probing mind pulls observation and insight to the fore. The psych ward is a terrifying and unfriendly place, where, “within this chemical straightjacket I am the final tiny babushka.” (p6) yet equally, I laughed out loud at the, “blue plastic mattress that farts if you sit down too quickly,” (p8) and her cataloguing of all the details in the room. “Familiar Air Vent, oh how happy I am to see you there!” (p15)

Esme Weijun Wang writes in The Collected Schizophrenias, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense.” My Friend Fox is unwieldy, and difficult to categorise – which fits the subject matter perfectly. Everett’s prose gallops from the page, full of allusive language and metaphor – and this brimming is intentional, is part of the experience of living through and with mental illness. The non-linear structure and movement between non-fiction and fiction, with animal voices and illustrations interspersed throughout the book create a text that is bursting forth with life, rich in metaphor and unafraid to sit with complexity.

Ruby Hillsmith writes in, ‘The problem of living: Dispatches from deep psychiatry’ (Griffith Review 72: States of Mind), “The psychiatric ward is gravely ill. The psychiatric ward doesn’t want you to know this. The psychiatric ward is in deep denial. Heads down, thumbs up.” My Friend Fox is in a way writing against the psych ward, kicking back at a system that all too often strips those who use it of their individuality. Hillsmith comments, “It’s up to the patient to cling to their identity in a context engineered to break it.” Memoir as a form provides Everett an opportunity to witness herself – or selves, evolving over time, as the case may be – to cement her own narrative in her own words. It blew my mind when I was first introduced to the idea of history as plural – that capital ‘H’ History wasn’t only something to be mapped and pinned down, attached to a series of dates or verifiable facts according to whatever documentation was available. That it was a living, breathing thing – a collection of narratives that intersect and contradict, and that of course there are power dynamics, inequalities, biases and inaccuracies at play within the records and accounts we have to make sense of what has happened. Our own histories are plural too – growing and morphing as we age, adapt, re- or mis- remember, and My Friend Fox acknowledges this through its experimentation with form.

My Friend Fox is punctuated by Everett’s illustrations, which depict scenes from the text and offer a visual entry point into her perspective, in a very literal sense. The style and level of detail in these images varies throughout, correlated to where Everett’s state of mind is at within the narrative. Some illustrations are breathtakingly photorealistic, some figurative, with close attention paid to shadow and where it falls, and some are rough sketches. The drawings of animals in particular carry the most detail, in contrast to the loosely depicted faces of people. Art and animals are ultimately the keys for Everett to find more balance. From the old man who plays the guitar on the psych ward and inspires Everett’s own love affair with the instrument, to the songwriting group run by the Bipolar Bears and a local TAFE course in illustration, the healing influence of the arts cuts through like no other treatment within the book, and sits in start contrast to the terrors of the psych ward.

Animal voices are central to the text – from the field of cow, and seashore of her eponymous friend fox, and a final letter from her dear friend Tigger; the gorgeous mutt who was Heidi’s best friend for almost sixteen years. Tigger, “the calm, regal, little red dog,” who is “immediately exposed as a young tearaway canine backpacker scamming the system to escape,” (117) the moment Everett leaves the pound with him, is a central figure within the book. Everett describes their relationship as “a symbiotic friendship,” herself, “a human scraped out, empty of any affection. Yet I became lovable through his animal eyes – so much so that I could really feel that love. Tigger became my muse for everything.” (p. 118) This deep affinity for animals is a healing influence, and one I – and I’m sure many other readers – can relate to. When I was catatonically fatigued in my late teens and could rarely move from my bed, the terrier I’d grown up with was my constant companion. David Stavanger’s poem ‘Suicide Dogs’, from his 2020 collection Case Notes, comes to mind – “They will never abandon you. They will forever hold / the slender bone of hope, tender in their jaws.”

Nuanced representations of mental illness that make space for the positive elements that can come with altered reality as well as the destructive, dysfunctional or painful aspects can be difficult to find. In My Friend Fox, much of Everett’s path to healing comes through creativity, in contrast to the traumatising experiences of the mental health system. This little book carries with it a lot of wisdom, and Everett manages to carry a lot of compassion for herself as well as others.

IZZY ROBERTS-ORR is a poet, writer, broadcaster and arts worker based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land in regional Victoria. Currently completing a book of elegiac poetry, Raw Salt, Izzy is a 2020-2021 recipient of the Australia Council Marten Bequest Scholarship for Poetry.

Christine Shamista reviews How Decent Folk Behave by Maxine Beneba Clarke

November 22, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

How Decent Folk Behave

By Maxine Beneba Clarke

Hachette

ISBN 9780733647666

Reviewed by CHRISTINE SHAMISTA

Building glass walls to show ‘how decent folk behave’

From the beginning to the end, front and back covers inclusive, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s newly released book, How Decent Folk Behave, is rich with carefully curated images and words that connect with and confront the reader. Poetry is both mystical and tangible. For many of us, particularly us writers of colour, it’s the natural way in which we tell our stories. According to Nina Simone, the artist’s duty is ‘to reflect the times’. This quote precedes the table of contents and gives context to the following pages – Beneba Clarke’s account of our recent collective events. 

Beneba Clarke’s refusal to use traditional punctuation, her playful and clever use of line breaks and formatting, her exploration of place, historical references and lived experiences make for a rich and unique collection. How Decent Folk Behave, ethically provocative in its title, takes us on a cleverly sequenced journey, commencing with a prologue that warns us to ‘be prepared’, for there is poetry beyond! It starts with the day before the year 2000 in the first poem ‘when the decade broke’. Many of us will remember this day very clearly. We were warned that at the stroke of midnight, catastrophe would occur due to the constraints of and our over reliance on computer technology. Beneba Clarke carries a sense of dread throughout this first poem, and so begins the rollercoaster ride as we read the poems that follow. Her poetry weaves through recent events and connects personal micro moments to the systemic macro moments that mark our time. Like lockdown life enforced on us, she carefully gets us to slow down and observe,  as we ‘… also … learn/ how to grow the world; from seed’ (‘generation zoom’).

Beneba Clarke’s critique of our recent times doesn’t attempt to claim there is a perfect way. In the searing poem, ‘my feminism’: she writes that ‘all feminism is flawed, but/ my feminism/ will try… my feminism/ will amplify/ the songs/ of the silenced … my feminism/ does not go/ smashing glass ceilings/ at the same time it builds glass walls’. Yes, we women march for feminist causes, yet we often do so at the cost of other women’s sacrifices. Past and present sacrifices have given us the opportunity to have an amplified and powerful voice. She shows us the shadow side too – that domestic violence for example, is perpetrated by the hands of those we thought we brought up right. The facets she reveals expose the disturbing intersectional layers of abuse, racism, ableism and sexism.

In her 2009 TED talk, ‘The Danger of the Single Story’, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns: ‘The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.’ Beneba Clarke exposes the myth of a single story through her writing, which is how she describes her feminism – strong, fierce, burning, alive, smart, intersectional and kind. 

As a woman of colour and a mother, ‘grace’ was another poem that resonated strongly with me. She explores the truths that our children teach us in the relentless and exhausting lessons of motherhood: how it opens our hearts; how it decentralises from just us; that we are shown life through our stubborn, strong willed, ‘solid’ child, in the mess, in the constant waking through the night. Beneba Clarke explores the high price of the motherhood journey while acknowledging it also adds a ‘hum’ to the home we build and maintain. We then need to let go of the beings who are ours, and also not ours.

‘the monsters are out’ weaves this description of motherhood to the uncomfortable truth that ‘… monsters/ have the same face/ as our sleeping four-year-olds’, our wondrous children. She takes us through the tragic accounts of Jill Meagher’s final hours, and then doesn’t let us ignore the accounts of those less recognised, like Natalina Angok. This particular part of the journey takes us to the ‘capital’ poem, our nation’s capital, and specifically, our Parliament House, where men flourish and women languish.

The experiences of not being believed, being misunderstood and left suffering is powerfully explored in ‘trouble walking’. This gave me disturbing déjà vu to health issues that go misdiagnosed among people of colour, showing the reader that for some, it’s easier to cope with pain than have to engage in discriminatory health systems that are quick to judge. In ‘muscle memory’, she rightfully takes us through the ‘us’ and ‘them’ that occurs to ‘communities of colour’. The ‘they’ constantly remind us we are more susceptible to infections and diseases, yet less likely to engage in health care support. Both are reductionist generalisations that fail to recognise the various ways in which societies and systems perpetuate racism. Paradoxically, it is often these ‘communities of colour’ that sustain health practitioners in the workforce – looking after their children, cleaning their houses and workplaces, making food, and driving them in Ubers.

When we’re halfway through the collection, prepare to feel deservedly uncomfortable at ‘home to biloela’. We read Beneba Clarke’s account of one of our greatest current failings: the attempted deportation, detention and continued uncertainty we’ve given Priya, Nades, Tharnicaa and Kopika – often referred to as the Biloela family. She continues her portrayal of control in ‘surveillance’ which explores how surveillance legislation continues colonisation of brown bodies by the law enforcement institutions. Her focus narrows on the perpetrator in ‘wolf pack’. Beneba Clarke challenges the term ‘lone wolf’ which, in the events of the Christchurch massacre, descriptions of the ‘blond boy’ with his ‘mock-shy smile’ (and other lone wolves across the globe, in the USA, Norway, England) rightfully question our broader role and responsibility in the formation of ‘lone wolves’.

‘fourteen and nine months’ took me back to that golden age when we get to have our first job. And grateful we are, right? For our first pay cheque? Finally, for the first time, we get money straight into our hands. Many of us didn’t really know or care that we were receiving the minimum wage or lower. And our bosses knew that, and also knew there were plenty of others who would be happy with getting these low wages too. Beneba Clarke then connects this experience with the making of Australia’s ‘self-made’ male millionaires, before juxtaposing the crime of underpayment with the brutal notification of Centrelink overpayment, via robocall.

Her final poem, ‘fire moves faster’, is like a benediction to this collection. It’s a reflection of 2020, taking us from Wuhan to Italy, reminding us of the great toilet paper and canned goods drought, of empty cities and online learning. It was the year when nations watched and then retold the message that ‘black lives matter’; a phrase that needed to be told over and over again because racism occurs on such a scale that it results in a US man like George Floyd being murdered by those who are meant to protect and keep him (and all of us) safe. There are far too many accounts of similar instances here in our soil, experienced by our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. And so, as she writes, the world was proclaiming ‘black lives matter/black lives matter’, and ‘… just for a moment/ you [we] could taste a dream of hope.’ Yes, despite it all, there was hope.

Beneba Clarke’s final page reminds us that 2020 went full speed, and yet was so slow. She recalls how we returned to a gentler rhythm, observed the wonder of nature, of children playing old-school style, how we had the time to actually find out our ‘neighbour’s name’. She reminds us of the hope that exists, because of us ‘ordinary people’, and our ability to fight and survive. And tell our stories.

I marvel at her concise approach to every day racism that is delivered with such intimate detail. It is a superb curation of uncomfortable truths for those of us who experience such oppressions and those who are willing to listen, and hopefully be part of the change. I’ve read nothing like this collection. But don’t take my word for it. Read it for your self.

CHRISTINE RATNASINGHAM is a writer and poet who lives on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney. Her writing has been published in Sweatshop Women Volumes 1 & 2 anthologies (2019 & 2020), Sweatshop’s Racism Anthology, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2013) and a number of journals including Mascara Literary Journal, FourW, Hypallage, Peril, and extempore.

Adele Aria reviews Racism edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, Phoebe Grainer

November 21, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Racism: Stories on fear, hate and bigotry

Edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer

Sweatshop Literacy Movement

Reviewed by ADELE ARIA

I was eager yet simultaneously exhausted to begin reading Racism: Stories on fear, hate & bigotry. This is not a criticism but rather acknowledges my visceral familiarity with the phenomenon. I suspect too many of us know, intimately, what racism feels like and how it manifests in our lives, often infusing our lives as embodied trauma, regardless of attempts to refuse the internalisation of harmful othering narratives. Produced by the Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement, the editorial team have curated a suite of stories by First Peoples writers, Black writers, and writers of colour to create a timely insight to the multiplicity of personal experiences. Reflections and stories of racism are interwoven with varied perspectives on how racism exists, ranging from the foundational violence of colonisation, Australia’s ongoing coloniality, the nuances of structural and systemic racism, to contested definitions, often imposed by those who inflict it rather than those who endure it. Centring experiences and voices who are often marginalised for their difference, the anthology enacts a resistance to how discussions on racism are derailed or quelled. It is also hard to know if contributors felt empowered, given this form of exposure and substantial labour is so often demanded from people whose lives and identities are marginalised. Attempts to challenge or claim social power often come with costs. It is also a delicate undertaking when Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in Talkin’ up to the white woman cautions that virtuous objectives of fighting racism might instead entrench the essentialising ideology of it.

Racism blurs lines between writing forms such as memoir or testimony and fiction, refusing to clearly distinguish them to focus readers on the complex and multi-faceted truths of racism. It reflects the heterogeneity of possible responses to the invitation to share stories on fear, hate, and bigotry. The anthology is the unflinchingly intimate product of three literary collectives: Western Sydney Writers Group, Sweatshop Women Collective, and Black Lives Workshop. The project intentionally confronts the broad spectrum of racism as a very real othering experience faced by many Australians despite the propagated myth that Australia isn’t racist. It recognises the colonialist brutality that provides the foundation of Australia and prompts interrogation of how racism is encultured.

Some stories portray understandable yet detrimental internalisation, while others rage at the way it imposes shame for being different and discomforting to whiteness. Other narratives evoke a sense of distress, rage, and demand for change. Some writers share poignant appreciations of how survivalism can be a unifying drive across the intersections of being diverse to a mythic norm in which Australia remains invested. The changing tones and approaches provide a journey of tension, without being so unrelenting that it becomes overwhelming. The stories do not feel like they have been censored or reshaped for palatability, but instead often dive into raw truths. The arresting lyricism and evocative depictions of bigotry build an urgency to keep reading.

Potentially, this collection is an opportunity for those at different stages of allyship, solidarity, and learning about how others live with apparently unavoidable burdens of othering and racialised stereotypes. The alienation exerted by racism upon First Nations people, Black people, and people of colour (FNBPOC) are transformed by insistence that readers recognise their humanity and question the acceptability of such harmful processes. It represents a compelling invitation to see, witness, and understand. Simultaneously, it signals the complexity of allyship and demands anti-racism be more than symbolic. As Max Edwards notes, the “desire to prove a lack of racism by demonstrating proximity to Blaknesss… dehumanises us”(175).

Challenging the tokenisation of non-white existence, the anthology honours the critically conscious existence of being racialised and objectified. The collective has refused the colonialist gaslighting narrative that racism doesn’t exist, revealing its pervasive influence upon social systems, structures, and day-to-day lives of people living in a nation state founded through violence. ‘an act of advice in motherhood’ by Meyrnah Khodr is steeped in the need to cultivate safety and protection in the face of the supposedly absent racism. In Amani Haydar’s ‘hijab days’ we see vilifications of religious practice made into excuses for bad behaviour.

I argue Racism also provides value for anyone whose own lives are inextricably bruised by others’ fear, hate, and targeted bigotry. Necessarily, there are nuances to others’ experiences, despite the often-unimaginative ways people enact the cruelty and brutality of racist attitudes and beliefs. Some readers might see their own lives and difficult moments represented in this book and may also find insight into varied vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies. Difference and experiences are idiosyncratic, such as at the intersections of anti-Blackness and power dynamics between child and adult in Guido Melo’s account which reminds us that the trauma of racism is often written into people before they find homes in so-called Australia. I also do not think FNBPOC owe further immersion in the lives and pain of other people made busy surviving racism.

Juxtaposed with examples of racist attitudes and thinking, the collection also considers the reality that survival and resilience often coincide with internalisations, which might manifest as the lateral violence described in Shirley Le’s ‘looking classy, what are you?’, the anti-Blackness of an advertisement in Ayusha Nand’s chapter, or Chris Tupouniua’s and Rizcel Gagawanan’s accounts of judgements about what constitutes an adequate performance of race.

The anthology winds through preoccupations of belonging and identity, the exclusionary impulse that categorises and dehumanises, and the fraught navigation of power dynamics. Despite mainstreamed voices suggesting these are historic processes that no longer exist, it becomes undeniable they are ongoing contemporary issues. It becomes clear that people are not single-issue representatives, showing intersectionally marginalising forces such as sexism and classism. 

Wresting power from white creators who have been dominant voices defining representations and stories of diversity, the anthology draws readers to the perspectives of FNBPOC instead. It reveals the insidious harm of mainstreamed voices dictating the order of things. It is the judgement produced by whiteness and propagated by others in Chris Tupouniua’s first prose piece. A character in Daniel Nour’s story contrasts the food of ‘multiculturalism’ with ‘normal foods’ like steak and broccoli as if there is magnamity in whiteness permitting diversity.

While Heikmah Napadow’s ‘zooper dooper’ shows us how simple an ally’s act of defiance can be, there is no pandering to those who offer allyship, conditional upon gratitude and sufficiently placatory anti-racism activism. In a world that recently witnessed the reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement and localised Blak Lives Matter action, reading Racism might be challenging for self-titled allies. It is gloriously non-compliant with the false boundaries of niceness in tone and content. 

Overall, the writing rejects attempts by whiteness to rehsape racism as inconsequential or rare unpleasantry. In the conclusion, Sarah Ayoub counters with the stark and disturbingly growing statistics of the many Indigenous people, amongst others, are paying with their lives.The harms and pain are no longer abstract. The ways in which some are empowered or emboldened to police identities and tone is made visible and problematised. Without falling in the trap of tediously explaining what racism is, the narratives are a testimony of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon. It unequivacolly rejects a reader’s power to dissociate.

The omnipresent force of racism can literally take lives and also steal precious moments. Sara Saleh skillfully takes the reader into the anxiety and denial of personhood that can occur, particularly amid the militarised precarity of Palestine. Even as global attention increasingly scrutinises the terror people are facing in Palestine, Saleh situates moments that might otherwise constitute togetherness and rituals of family in the omniprescence of colonialist violence. Like many other accounts, ‘beit samra’ interrogates whose lives are valued enough to galvanise change.

Understandably, the compilation might exclusively include writing to expose and commodify trauma and scars for educational consumption of others, but its span is greater than this. Janette Chen uses acerbic humour, playing with the apologism that underpins many racist behaviours. While resisting demands of consumability, writers artfully explicate how people are required to produce evidence of humanity. They must justify their existence, from producing literal receipts (such as the dockets Sydney Allen proffers under interrogation) to insistent demands of conformity with stereotyped ideas of what FNBPOC are supposed to be. Adam Phillip Anderson’s ‘round eyes white asian’ parallels the policing of racial identity that the protagonist is subjected to with how it might also serve as a shield, highlighting the distancing power of othering.

Childhood, beauty standards, tradition, success, grief, and colonialism are just some of the interwoven themes. Even in supposedly congenial workplaces, Amani Haydar shows the casual derision in a colleague describing Ramadan as “that thing”. Vacillating between the objectification of diversity as an educational exercise and the anxieties about what visibility might bring, Daniel Nour’s ‘tournament of the ethnics’ narrates the advocacy of a father who wants a son to be able to exist in his own way. In ‘palangi’, Chris Tupounia calls out the lazy demonising caricatures created by whiteness but also weaponised by other FNBPOC.

Featuring emerging and established writers, hailing from Indigenous, Arab, African, Asian, Latinx, African-American and Pasifika backgrounds, readers can engage in a robust provocative journey. It moves through explorations of racism, its universality and potency, the homogenising force of it, the power dynamics it propagates and is served by, survival and struggle, and its many forms whether directed outward or inward. The powerful, often raw and prosaic, lyrical works in the “micro aggressive fiction” portion serve as a crescendo for the collection. Crossing genres from poetry to prose to commentary, this section signals the movement through discomfort, self-doubt, and sorrow, but revels in withstanding and challenging of racism. They are bite-size rejections of demands to avoid being “angry while Blak” or to prove that a “model minority” person only speaks gently when spoken to. 

As the editorial team Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer attest, Racism is intended to be “raw, honest, provocative”(13). During the resurgence of the #BLM movement, booksellers reported a significant upswing in purchases of books on racism. This was soon followed by evidently prescient concerns that anti-racism books would remain unread, merely performative acquisitions displayed on bookshelves. I worry that people who could benefit from reading it, will not. Those of us who face racism infiltrating our lives might only relive those moments replicated in its pages. I urge readers to share and recommend it, insistently. Ensure the labour and talent contained within its covers an opportunity for more readers to dive deeper into understanding racism to be and why it exists. The potential value of the reading experience is limited by who will not pick up the book. However, I personally have some reservations about some inclusions perpetuating ideas such as ableism in describing antagonists, conflation of Asian identities with yellowness, and the colonialist possessiveness of “our” Aboriginal people or “Aboriginal Australians”.

FNBPOC are not a homogenous monolithic identity, and neither are the stories homogenous. Refreshingly, the collection is unconstrained by cookie cutter ideas of what literature is supposed to look like, resulting in writing imbued with the individualism of the authors and their lives. There is a range of exploratory narratives from the humorous allegory of chasing away Eurocentrism in Tyree Barnette’s ‘invasions’ to the anguish in Nellie Tapu Nonumalo Mu’s ‘the white don’t like the black’. Contributors share vulnerably in explorations on vulnerability, rage, grief, defiance, exhaustion, and reflect upon the lived reality of racism. Facing into the unsettling reality that the pathway to resilience is paved in survival, the comfort of whiteness is not privileged. Australia’s persistent coloniality generates a liminality to which it pushes anyone who doesn’t meet the narrow definition of “Australian” but Racism: Stories on fear, hate & bigotry centers and amplifies voices from the edges. Embodying the Sweatshop editors’ commitment to the power of literature, it refuses to be party to the erasure of the pretense that racism isn’t real, here and abroad. The white gaze is, finally, not the defining approach to racism in Australia.

Notes
1. I use the atypical initialism of FNBPOC in recognition and acknowledgement of the primacy of the traditional custodians of the lands upon which the anthology writers and I are situated. The many First Nations peoples whose sovereignty was never ceded, have been most targeted by the violence of racialisation in the founding of the Australian nation state. However, I note the preferences in language are constantly shifting and I do not intend my use of this term to override any individual’s self-representations or community preferences.

Fernanda Dahlstrom reviews One Hundred Days by Alice Pung

November 14, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

One Hundred Days

Alice Pung

Black Inc

Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM

Alice Pung’s fifth book and second novel, One Hundred Days (Black Inc, 2021), deals with the difficult relationship between sixteen-year-old Karuna and her manipulative and overbearing (but also loving and hardworking) Chinese Filapino mother. Karuna’s father, who is Anglo Australian, has left the family and she has fallen pregnant to a boy she knew only briefly. The setting is 1980s Melbourne. Information is not readily accessible and hysteria about AIDS is rife. Pung tells a simple story that is rich and layered, exploring with compassion both the dysfunction and the strength of a complex mother-daughter relationship and ultimately empowering and vindicating the teenage protagonist. 

The novel begins with Karuna addressing her unborn baby as she lies in bed beside her mother who ‘says she can’t sleep by herself, that it’s too dark’ (p.1). The claustrophobia is palpable and Karuna wishes she 

could start off with a fairytale (sic), something that makes you think the world is much bigger than us beneath our ceiling. But it’s just me and you and your Grand Mar…there is no big bad wolf, even though your Grand Mar wants to wring his name out of me (p.1-2). 

We soon learn than the Grand Mar in question plans to treat the baby as her own and to raise her believing that Karuna is her sister. The older woman’s looseness with the truth becomes clear and Karuna’s frank and intimate narrative is a pushback against her mother’s attempts to rewrite her story.  

Karuna’s mother decides to confine her daughter to their housing commission flat for one hundred days to keep her safe. We then learn that Karuna met a medical student during the summer before Year 11 and got him to take her on long drives through the western suburbs, before having sex with him in the back of his car. The second person point of view is mostly limited to referring to Karuna’s parents as ‘your Grand Mar’ and ‘your Grand Par’ in an unobtrusive reminder of whom the story is being told to. Karuna’s mother works for a hair and makeup salon during the day and cooks at a restaurant in the evening. Karuna likes to read but cannot think of anything more pointless than studying literature at university and has no professional ambitions. When she finds that she is pregnant, she thinks that at least she’ll have something of her own. 

All too often, mothers are romanticised, even fetishized, as selfless, wise and endlessly emotionally giving. Their sometimes-questionable behaviour towards their teenage daughters is a subject often spoken of with a platitudinous whitewashing that belittles or erases the experiences of daughters who have been subjected to true abuse. In contrast, One Hundred Days thoroughly interrogates the mother’s abuses of power and misconceived overprotectiveness of Karuna. She complains, ‘Aussie(s) think everything is child abuse’ (p. 12) and uses her culture to excuse her controlling and eccentric behaviour towards her more educated daughter. This extends to making Karuna boil watermelon, forbidding her to eat crab in case the baby is born with six fingers and warning her not to use glue as it will cause the baby to be born with birthmarks. Karuna eventually suspects ‘she is just making it up as she goes along, this cultural stuff’ (p.227), highlighting the disconnect between migrant parents and their Australian-born children. 

Pung deftly captures the difficulty for a teenage girl of conveying to outsiders the wrongness of her relationship with her mother when, on the surface, it does not appear abusive. ‘Your mother’s just making sure you get plenty of rest’ (p.108), a teacher tells Karuna, when she tries desperately to tell the woman about her confinement in the flat. After her baby has been born, she ponders, ‘She doesn’t hit me, she doesn’t hurt us – how would authorities see what is wrong with our situation?’ (p.101) Pung also captures the ambivalence of a child who is mistreated by a parent and the half-awareness about one’s rights that can exist in this space. Karuna is at once outraged at the disrespect she receives from her mother and quick to protect the woman from consequences and from the judgements of others. When emergency services suggest sending out police after her mother locks her and the baby inside the flat on the hottest day of the year, she panics. When at last she succeeds in winning some autonomy and space, she is quick to reflect on how her mother has worked overtime for weeks, rocked the baby to sleep and got her everything she owns that’s not donated. Their relationship, at last, starts to resolve into one of mutual respect. 

As someone from a single parent background, I found it refreshing that One Hundred Days does not play into some of the common tropes of narratives of single motherhood, where characters often yearn to connect with an absent father. Karuna gives the baby’s father only the most fleeting importance. Her own father’s absence from her life is also largely peripheral to the story, with the focus kept squarely on the relationship between the women. When she loses her virginity to nineteen-year-old Ray, the conquest is hers, but it is primarily a victory over her mother’s stifling control; the boy a means to an end.

If I hadn’t been in his car, I would have wanted to raise a triumphant fist in the air. Woohoo!…It didn’t make me a woman, but it did make me a separate person with secrets. (p. 56)

Ray is cast as harmlessly buffoonish. He asks if The Handmaid’s Tale is some kind of fairy tale and tries to work out Karuna’s ethnicity from her name, with an arrogance for which she gently mocks him. 

Fairy tales pervade Pung’s novel, with Karuna’s confinement in the apartment tower calling to mind the story of Rapunzel. She repeatedly recalls the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth as she tries to find her way through the maze of her relationship with her increasingly paranoid and delusional mother who has ‘stolen’ her baby, and to escape the prison she has made of their flat. However, Karuna’s relationship with her mother is too complex to reduce to fairy tale archetypes. Ray is eventually relegated to ‘the Once that started this Upon a Time’ (p.239).

One Hundred Days contains echoes of Caroline Baum’s Only: A Singular Memoir (2017), in its exploration of the claustrophobia of life as an only child and the over-identification with parents that this can bring. Karuna’s situation is also reminiscent of Margo Lanagan’s The Best Thing (1995) but in Pung’s world it is the middle-aged grandmother, rather than the teenage mother, on whom it is incumbent to make concessions so that the pair can move on to the next stage of their lives. The novel engages with issues of race and class while dealing primarily with a relationship that teeters on the edge of family violence. Karuna is ultimately delivered in her struggle for recognition and autonomy, while the hardships faced by her mother are acknowledged, in an uplifting validation of both women. 
 
 
FERNANDA DAHLSTROM is a writer, editor and lawyer who lives in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Overland, Kill Your Darlings and Art Guide.

Bec Kavanagh reviews Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery

October 22, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ordinary Matter

by Laura Elvery

UQP

Reviewed by BEC KAVANAGH

Laura Elvery’s second collection of short stories, Ordinary Matter, takes its inspiration from the mere twenty times women have won the Nobel Prize for science. And yet it isn’t science that connects the pieces in this collection, but the ‘softer’ stuff: the women in these stories are united by themes of motherhood, love, art – experiences which are often problematised, or portrayed as obstacles to a more ‘successful’ career-driven life. The choice between intellectual and domestic fulfilments, women are typically told, is an either/or deal. In Ordinary Matter, Elvery upsets these stereotypes, levelling the playing field between domestic, creative, and intellectual ambitions.

It comes as no surprise that Elvery is an academic writer as well as a creative one – Ordinary Matter is a collection that celebrates research and academia in both theme and structure. The framework of the book is proudly conceptual and crisply punctuates the stories: each piece prefaced by a paratextual nod to the prize-winner who inspired it, such as ‘1988. Gertrude B. Elion. Physiology or Medicine. Prize motivation: ‘for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment’. The individual stories are then gathered into this framework, some building directly on the scientist or her discovery, some connecting more ambiguously – a baby washed ashore and transforming the parents who adopt her, or a grieving man looking to understand and avenge his brother’s death. 

For some this framework, changing as it does with each story, will be a puzzle, a tantalising investigation into the threads of research woven carefully through the narrative, deepening with each reading. Perhaps others might ignore it altogether. On the other hand, it can be a distraction, the overt nature of the project somewhat at odds with the ambiguity of some of the stories. And although Elvery does provide a short glossary at the back, a paragraph summarising the notable accomplishments of each of the scientists, wondering where the narrative of each piece aligns with the object of its inspiration can be too much of a diversion, particularly when the connection isn’t so obvious. Having said this, there’s a beautiful leap of faith that Elvery places in her reader, a belief that they are up to the intellectual challenge of the work without clear or consistent signposting.

Elvery’s strength lies in the surreal elements of her writing – the sense of displacement that comes from the alignment of stories set in past, present and future with characters who are outliers, women who trouble the edges of their gendered roles. The subtle ways Elvery teases the reality of her subjects is captivating, leaving the reader with a sense of wonderment, of wondering. In ‘Something Close to Gold’ (Irene Joliot-Curie, Chemistry, 1935), my favourite piece in the collection, a couple grieving multiple failed attempts at IVF find a baby on the beach and, through an absurd but not altogether unrealistic bureaucratic process, manage to adopt her. The story works on a knife’s edge, keeping a fine balance between the push-pull of grief and loss, of hope and release. It is a piece that might be read in many ways, depending on the way the reader interprets the imagery, it might become a straightforward piece about the fragile, disturbed metamorphosis of motherhood. Taken another way it might be an allegory for colonisation, or Australia’s heartless policies on asylum seekers. Elvery provides enough details to make these pieces rich with meaning, allowing them to be held and turned over and over, revealing new parts of themselves each time.

Jerome de Groot (The Historical Novel) proposes that ‘historical novels clearly invite the reader to reflect on the ways in which ‘history’ is told to them. They have a double effect, a kind of unsettling uncanniness, which seeks to enable an awareness of the wroughtness of both ‘history’ and ‘fiction’.’ That term — ‘unsettling uncanniness’— suits these stories, which do bring together the duality (among others) of fiction and fact, inviting us to reflect on the limits imposed on women in science – where they come from, who upholds them, and the ways in which they are still ongoing. In ‘Better Nature’ (Ada E. Yonath, Chemistry, 2009), a pregnant researcher is abruptly cast out from her research circle. The story takes place in the in-between, in the moment where she is neither academic nor mother – ‘I had been in that city, and in that world with my famous, fearsome supervisor and her loyal group of laser-focused students. And now I wasn’t.’ There are moments like this in most of the stories, where Elvery holds her characters in the space of what will be/what might have been. Sometimes, as in ‘Grand Canyon’ (Marie Curie, Chemistry, 1911), these edges manifest literally, with Curie ‘staring into the void’. Cleverly (at times frustratingly), Elvery often leaves us at the edge of these moments, refusing solid resolutions.

All of the stories are experiments in one way or another, and this sense of playfulness goes some way to balancing the overt intellect of the academic construct. Elvery experiments with theme, voice and structure – ‘Hyperobject’ (Maria Goeppert Mayer, Physics, 1963) is written in secretarial shorthand, the lightness of the text in powerful juxtaposition with the severity of the theme, while ‘Little Fly’ (Tu Youyou, Physiology or Medicine, 2015) uses a baby’s point of view to amplify her inability to control her surroundings. Whether these experiments succeed is incidental really – the appeal lies not in their success as much as Elvery’s willingness to be versatile in her prose, refusing (much like the subjects of her stories) to be restrained by a singular set of expectations.

The magic of Ordinary Matter is in Elvery’s ability to find the ordinary from the extraordinary rather than the other way around. In a world that tells women they must be exceptional in order to succeed these stories bring forth all the ordinary moments upon which greatness pivots. Despite its occasionally dense intellectual frame, Ordinary Matter is an impressive collection which invokes a sense of curiosity and play.  

BEC KAVANAGH is a Melbourne-based writer and academic whose work examines the representation of women’s bodies in literature. She has appeared at writers’ festivals nationally, and judged a number of literary prizes, including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her literary criticism can be found in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper and The Big Issue, and she has written fiction and non-fiction for a number of publications including Westerly, Overland, Meanjin, and the Review of Australian Fiction. Bec is the Youth Programme Manager at the Wheeler Centre, and a sessional tutor and PhD candidate at LaTrobe University.

Ben Hession reviews Whisper Songs by Tony Birch

October 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Whisper Songs

by Tony Birch

UQP

ISBN 9780702263279

Reviewed by BEN HESSION

Tony Birch is a Naarm (Melbourne) based writer, who is probably better known for his prose, including his short story collections and novels, of which, The White Girl, won the Indigenous Writers’ Prize of the 2020 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. He was also the winner of the Patrick White Award back in 2017. Whisper Songs is Birch’s second volume of poetry and comes five years after Broken Teeth. Much of Whisper Songs was written during last year’s COVID -19 related lockdowns and may be seen as a meditation on his Aboriginal identity. However, in Whisper Songs, the reader is more than a mere spectator of the poet’s autobiography and revelation. Rather, Birch invites us to share something of a largely personal journey, exploring a sense of heritage and connection to Country.

Throughout Whisper Songs, Birch creates narratives that are underwritten, yet offer a vivid sense of a time and place which are traced towards their meaning and impact. As we see in ‘Dragster’, and the masculine trials of youth: 

red bicycles ring in tandem

slalom empty streets

chrome                             on morning sunlight

tyres                                 on crumbling bitumen

floating                             on air

we rode the world together

fearless 501s barefoot 

no shirts no hands

cigarettes

reckless                            bodies battling

we were                            born to pain
(5)

Similarly, in ‘How Water Works’ the movement of water between the macrocosm and microcosm appears as an essential life-force:

bowl of arctic water
moving slowly south
sleeping ebbing rising
upwelling loops of life
seconds     centimetres
patience slowly spirit
beauty and humility

shape shift onward
through air bodies
entwined with other waters
in plants in soil in Country
(61)

The collection is divided into three sections – Blood, Skin and Water – which are stages of a lateral exploration of something of what Lyn McCredden describes as a ‘locatedness in poetry’ (McCredden 3). In Blood, Birch deals with family connections with much of these educed through a “meat on the bones” (Birch, 267) social history, which, as Carolyn Masel and Matthew Ryan note, with respect to Birch’s short story, ‘Shadowboxing’, provides ‘the map-like evocation of place and the idea of an alternative ‘obscured’ history running through that place’ (Masel, Ryan 5). But rather than use the fictive elaboration of a short story to access the “individual experiences of marginalisation” (Masel, Ryan 5), Birch uses recollection and emotional attachment. This, at times, is elegiac, as we see in ‘Leaving’, with its fusion of day, the suburban place and personal relations: 

a moment of light,
a painted face of beauty
glimpsed in Saturday shop window
forever waiting our return

blood ties on every street corner
aunties uncles cousins
grandparents haunted shades
of black on white all gone   (25-26)

Similarly, we see in the poem, ‘Little Man’, place, time and connection:

searched for you at night
beyond the creaking gate
old haunts street corners
back lanes dressed in rain
big sky darkness

spoke soft words
calling your name
echoes to glimpsed light
fell with a dying moon
our whispered songs for you  

(5)

In this poem, as well as in ‘Dragster’ and others in the collection narratives are not filled out, but are kept allusive with the bonds with family members being as deep as their stories are implicit. This may prove a little difficult to follow, at least initially; though, identity is often about piecing together the past, and the past with the present while our bonds with others are carried within us, unseen. In ‘Blood’, Birch opens us to a small-letter sense of familiarity. In ‘Fading Light’, this allows us feel the sense of loss for the poet’s grandfather: 

my mother a girl of twelve
found his soulless body
slumped across the bathtub
he left her no story
and the coroner gave little away:

              well-built man
             aged forty-seven
             came home from work
             took carving knife
             cut his throat
(7-8)

Blood is symbolic as an elemental part of Birch’s Aboriginal lineage. Its loss, as seen in this poem, or potential for loss, as seen elsewhere, therefore, is emblematic of a disruption that is shown to be violent and self destructive. Importantly, what remains is not silence, but the cold language of the State, and, particularly in ‘Trouble, Trouble, Trouble: Probation File 29/1957′, the colonizing apparatus. Here is the choice is made between the blood associated with internalized violence or the affirmation of identity and the resistance to colonization: 

the boy himself becomes that which he fears
violence courses his veins and therefore –
therefore he must become the protected one
by us for us and himself and for the country
this the only Nation girt by sea
(19)

Blood is thus political as it is personal. It provides that locatedness, which, as McCredden says, ‘is able to speak with earthy, experiential and historical authority, and to offer alternatives to the often too readily universalising, national and global discourses.’ (McCredden 3) And, as demonstrated in the poem Isobel, written for the poet’s granddaughter, the bloodline carries hope and strength for the future:

beautifully stubborn
four years and rising
deep frown eyes fierce
limbs of courage
a girl holding ground
bone and memory
of women reaching back
meeting deep time then
cartwheeling forward
armour for her courage

            she is the circle we gather
(11)

 With blood, Birch establishes a personal sense of locatedness and identity.  Skin, we see, then explores the external definitions of these parameters. The section opens with ‘The Eight Truths of Khan’, wherein Birch’s Punjabi ancestor, must affirm his humanity against the racist formalities of the White Australia Policy, which restrict the movements of people of colour.

‘I agreed that yes, I was fortunate to be allowed to reside
in such a fair prosperous Nation. That evening I again
sat with my wife & child, I again bathed & my wife &
I shared the same bed.’ (33)

In this poem, Birch uses parody as a means of emphasising the absurdity of the restrictions imposed upon his ancestor, as well as the casual and banal nature of the racism: 

applicant Khan should be seen, physically,
& compared to image held of him
by Customs, in grey metal filing cabinet
(alongside the oven) in staff kitchen (36)

Here, and elsewhere in Skin, Birch interrogates history by mimicking the language of institutional racism, recontextualising it, thus denying any erstwhile pretences towards “civilized” or legal neutrality. We see in ‘Forbearer’, the subject’s humanity is set against the dry inventory of attributes that routinely deny it. Again, Birch puts flesh back onto history. In the subsequent poem, ‘A Matter of Lives’, (where the title, itself, alludes to Black Lives Matter), this idea is given a more contemporary setting, with powerful effect, with a reference to the situation concerning Tanya Day and her death in police custody. Here, her humanity is also set against the cynical machinations of mainstream media:

a black woman asleep on a train
is no news is good news
until the day arrives
and she becomes
a fact of death
a number
(44)

Throughout Skin, Birch demonstrates the specialised use of language as an instrument of power for white people over black or brown, who have thus been forced to populate the feared and denigrated ‘Other’. The poem, ‘Razor-wire Nation’, shows this intentioned positioning through a language reserved for an enemy belligerent:

while love is an empty box
we busily tend the cages

gun-turret warriors
for a razor-wire nation  (50)

Conversely, skin and colour as a self-signifier of collective identity allows its assertion as a form of strength and power, against a world “slumbering at home”, as seen in ‘Waiting for a Train with Thelma Plum’:

we slouch beaten
except for a Girl in Blak
kiss of life in black boots
black jeans and hoodie
black/red/yellow flag on her back
headphones soon to pounce

she moves raises an arm
fist clenched ‘Hey!… Hey!’ –
Fuck that                                 (45)

The poem, ‘Tunnerminnerwait’, closes the Skin section. Here, identity is signified through the white skin of the coloniser’s language.  The inherent sense of identity, as elsewhere seen in Skin, is confronted by colonial laws, naming and presumptions. Through capital punishment, these attempt an absolute control with the overbearing threat to one’s own body, one’s own life. Against these, an ineffable, physical connection to Country provides resistance.

his name was Waterbird
and on the morning of
execution he announced

I have three heads

one for your noose
one for my grave
one for my country   (55)

The condemned bears insight, dignity and intransigence. These qualities permeate the underlying premise of ‘Whisper Songs’. In this collection, as blood courses throughout the body, so water does the land, each metaphorically reflecting the other. As Birch writes in ‘Birrarung Billabong’: 

Our hair was long and curled and magical, our eyes the
richest brown, our skin carried water, our water carried skin.
The sounds of the river rushing at the falls shared a pulse.  (66)

For Birch water is a vital element of the visceral. It becomes, as we see in ‘Desecrate’ – in spite of urbanisation and canalisation: ‘sacred blood of Country/ running with a song’ (76). Water alludes to life and locatedness at its most vivid. As an integral part of Country, it shares a sense of the maternal. In ‘Beneath the Bridge’, concerning the Westgate Bridge collapse, the tenderness is poignant and profound:

when the monster span thundered
across the west the bridge gave way
thirty-five workers came falling
and the Birrarung lay waiting
to gather the dead together 

she gave their souls a home
comforted fear and sadness
and returned battered bodies
to riverbank mourners clasping
soft hands of fatherless children    (74-75)

The essentially feminine nature of Country is rendered once again, in ‘Black Ophelia’:

deny the lord
the holy word
deny the gun

the wire and hoe
caste and colour theft
of ground of bodies

now be and be
with drifting river
with spirit water     (63)

The poem’s title alludes to Ophelia, the character in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. Unlike Shakespeare’s character, though, black Ophelia does not drown herself, but rather as an individual becomes sublimated with the river. She asserts an autochthonous presence, and an undeniable sovereignty over the land – one that is not negotiable.

go

to Black Ophelia
shimmering within
a sheet of glass 

open lips rising breasts
she sounds – always was
always will be…
(63)

A similar transcendence is seen in the final poem of the collection, ‘The Great Flood of 1971′. Here water overwhelms the landscape, and in turn demonstrates the inherent power of Country. Given the negative impact of organized religion, as noted in the poem ‘Sacred Heart’, the flood offers a chance of a genuine spiritual connection, with a kind of baptism in its own right, but where one becomes unified with nature’s vitality or elan:

surface gasping in a deluge
lightning tearing holes in sky
this river of rising life

            flood me  
(78)

In Whisper Songs, Birch moves beyond ordinarily compassed notions of authenticity, as something that is something self-consciously existential. Birch brings history and Country together in a journey to the soul. It is a journey of pain, poignancy, hope and sometimes humour. Birch’s abilities as a writer adeptly convey the songs whispered along the way. This is the gig. It is time for us to sit and listen.

Cited

McCredden, Lyn. ‘The Locatedness of Poetry’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 11.6 (2009).
Birch, Tony. ‘The Trouble With History’, Australian History Now, Eds. Clark, Anna and Ashton, Paul), New South Publishing, University of New South Wales Press, UNSW (2013).
Masel, Carolyn and Ryan, Matthew. ‘Place, History and Story: Tony Birch and the Yarra River’, Australian Literary Studies 31.2 (2016).
‘Tony Birch’s “Whisper Songs”’. Spoken Word, 3CR, broadcast on 1 July 2021, Naarm (Melbourne).

BEN HESSION is a Wollongong-based writer. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, International Chinese Language Forum, Cordite, and Can I Tell You A Secret?, the Don Bank Live Poets anthology. Ben’s poem, ‘A Song of Numbers’, was shortlisted for the 2013 Australian Poetry Science Poetry …

Kevin Hart reviews The Strangest Place by Stephen Edgar

October 6, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems

Stephen Edgar

Black Pepper

ISBN 9780648038740

Reviewed by KEVIN HART

Poetry always involves a delicate negotiation between craft and art. Craft can easily be misunderstood as a set of skills completely external to what is being written. Yet a poet shows craft by moving confidently within the work developing on the page. Often, when one looks at an intricately rhymed stanza, perhaps one with five, six or seven lines of varying length, such as Stephen Edgar favors, one might be tempted to think that the work has been composed, even revised, in the poet’s mind and then set down on the page. There are such compositions, some of them admirable, and examples can be found in volumes of minor seventeenth-century verse. The effect is known as “Ciceronian”: the style is marked by balance, antitheses, and repetition; it was developed to a high pitch in prose, not verse. Nothing could be further from Edgar’s characteristic way of writing, which is usually “Anti-Ciceronian.” Here sentences unfold naturally rather than exhibit a resolved formal beauty, and often the style is marked by asymmetric constructions. The poem shows a mind thinking as it progresses from stanza to stanza.

Too little is said, then, when critics say Edgar is a formalist, or range him against some of the better American “new formalists.” Like theirs, his poetry is often plain spoken; unlike theirs, it tends more surely to the baroque. With respect to contemporary poetry, “baroque” need not connote stylistic excess, invention or ornament. Nor need it prompt us to admire the deft use of elaborate poetic forms. In fact, Edgar has no deep investment in received poetic forms. Baroque poetry nowadays is more concerned with the presentation and contemplation of compound phenomena. Edgar’s poetry is baroque in this manner and is also remarkable for its fine sense of timing. In many of his most impressive poems he is concerned to investigate complex situations, sometimes unstable ones, which often involve fragility and loss: his consciousness becomes divided, or he encounters problems in constituting the world, or he quickly passes from one attitude to another (perception, belief, half-belief, fantasy, anticipation, recollection, and so on). “Timing” in poetry is not only a matter of pacing one’s speech, spacing out metaphors and similes, and seeking closure at the right moment. It is also the difficult practice of using enjambment, rhyme, varying line lengths, and metrical substitutions in order to place a word or a phrase. The proper timing of a word, a phrase, a figure, does not merely follow formal rules; it must also release thought and feeling at the right time and to the right degree. To read an engaging poem well is partly to be aware of the confidence and agility, of the poet as he or she writes, and to notice those moments, given only to very fine poets, when craft leads one to think of the phrasing as inevitable. Such reading perceives that in a poet as good as Philip Larkin craft and art become almost indistinguishable, and something similar may be said of Edgar.

The Strangest Place is a selection from ten previous volumes of poetry. “Nasturtiums” (81) was written in 1976 and the most recent poems, in the opening section entitled “Background Noise,” were completed in 2020. So the book distills forty-four years of practice as a poet. I should say “achievement as a poet,” and it would be a lapse of responsibility not to observe that Edgar’s work has only recently been read with anything like the attention and thankfulness it deserves. Quite simply, Edgar is one of the most rewarding poets currently writing in English. Poems in this volume are likely to survive when many of his contemporaries are remembered only in footnotes. At the moment, though, it is sad to testify how difficult it is to obtain any of his earlier books. I have repeatedly tried to purchase Eldershaw (2014), only excerpted in this selection. Nor can any library in the United States supply me with a copy. One can only hope that individual volumes will be brought back into print once the accomplishment of this selection has been duly acknowledged. 

Edgar is chiefly a contemplative poet. Not that, like the Romans, he looks into a templum to discern the will of the gods or has even the faintest streak of religious faith. When he listens to Thomas Tallis he says, “Not one word or wound, / One shred / Of their doxology can sway / Me to belief” (173). His templum is his mind, which is utterly modern, entranced more by physics than theology, and emotions and thoughts cross it, sometimes alone and sometimes together. For readers, though, each of his poems is a templum. What do we discover when we gaze at them? Many things, no doubt, but chiefly his imagination works in eschatological terms: everything points eventually to nothingness. He entertains the idea of “a posthumous, / Unpeopled world, a plot / That has no further use for us” (55) and he meditates on the aftermath of war: an empty town left to “the chaos of // Abandoned use” (134). More generally, he is haunted by the “black and empty corridor” which “lies in store” for all of us (283). The same imagination is entranced by divisions of the self, as when he identifies the inner voice that is forever murmuring in our heads: “always there is that accompanist, // Not caught on film or sound, who’s guaranteed / Each moment to intone / A running commentary” (29). In another poem, set in a restaurant, he sees his own reflection in a wall mirror behind where his friend sits: “I catch odd glimpses of it watching him, / And eyeing me / Askance, as he shifts and sways from side to side” (61). Always, Edgar is aware of the fragility of existence, human and non-human alike. Sitting in a house during a strong wind, he observes, “The house is brittle as an hourglass” (80). Often enough, it is an interruption of ordinary life that prompts a revealing change of mental attitude and gives an insight into the frailty of things: too many clocks in a house (20-21) or the recognition that books really write us (116). 

Edgar’s great theme, though, is the relation of mind and world. Sometimes, like Tolstoy and Montale, he is beset by the apprehension that the visible world might be an illusion. We spend our days, he says, “clearly reciting / The myth of an outer world” (196). In “Parallax” he recalls “a droll / Advertisement that had the Martians hoist / Before a rover’s lens screen after screen, / Across which it would scroll, / Filming a fake red desert, while unseen / Their high-rise city quietly rejoiced” (5). It leads him to ponder that something similar happens while “Walking the crafted streetscape” of Sydney: “A suite of flimsy panels” is perhaps sliding beside him, “screening who knows what?” (5). One approach to this theme comes by way of what Edgar calls “the conjuror” (12), and indeed worldly beauty is much like a magic show for him, both in what it offers us (“The silken trance it’s spun and shed” (246)) and in the chilling dénouement that awaits us. No wonder that we think of Schopenhauer when we read lines such as these: “The world cannot pretend / And with the end / Of the masquerade throws down its great disguise, / Like a magician’s cape whose folds / Descend / About an object which then disappears / Before unseeing eyes” (125). At other times, it is reading in physics that disturbs the otherwise unquestioned relation between mind and world. Handling a snow dome, he reflects that in a world of two dimensions, the third dimension would be “just a dream that quantum tricks produce” (32). Then panic sets in: “Put down that ornament and look around, / And breathe, for fear / The virtual world that some propound / Is ours, here, now, a program that supreme, / Conjectured beings engineer, / Where we imagine we are all we seem” (32). 

In Mauvaises pensées et autres (1943), Paul Valéry has a piercing aphorism entitled “Ex nihilo”: Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce [“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothing comes through”]. It is no wonder that Edgar is attracted to this line of Valéry’s — it forms the epigraph to the splendid conceptual lyric “The Menger Sponge” (148) — for the Australian and the French poets inhabit overlapping worlds. In this imbrication, poetry, music, science and a cool skepticism about religion live in rich harmony. Unlike Valéry, however, Edgar has no temptation to be all mind (as with Monsieur Teste), and he has no abiding interest in theorizing about the creative process. Only very obliquely does he offer us an ars poetica in “Feather Weight” (44). Nor is there anything like Mon Faust in his work: he is one of our most discreet poets. Not that one should thereby think, as some people do, that Edgar has little blood passion. The excepts from Eldershaw (2013) testify otherwise. Nonetheless, to read Edgar well is to learn to let the feeling in the verse display itself in its own good time; it will not overwhelm the reader on a first or second reading, neither by way of intense metaphors (which Edgar avoids) nor by way of ardent declarations (which he would most likely think to be in bad taste). 

Consider “Nocturnal” from History of the Day (2002). The opening stanza shows Edgar’s confidence handling a difficult stanza, nine lines, ranging from trimeter to pentameter, rhyming abbacccdd. Quite by chance, the speaker discovers an old cassette with a recording of his distressed partner talking years ago:

It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
    The all-pervading dark of space,
    But not meant for the world of men.
It’s not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of. Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you. (202)

Many of Edgar’s qualities are tightly coiled in these lines: elegance and lightness of touch, to be sure, but also plain speech, and, more, the relish of drawing an apt distinction. Notice the timing of the lines, how the drama of hearing the lover’s voice, now she is long dead, in the final word of the stanza, is embodied in the rhyme “few” – “you.” It is characteristic of Edgar that the discovery does not lead to confession or a registration of immediate grief but that a contemplation begins, one that leads us first to that wonderful poet Gwen Harwood (1920-95). Long ago, the lovers were jolted by hearing their friend’s voice on the radio reading “Suburban Sonnet.” Technology exhumes the dead with ease, and with them it brings our loss immediately before us. 

Again, characteristic of Edgar, the contemplation continues, passing now to the North Head Quarantine Station, near Manly, where people who were feared to harbor contagious diseases were kept until they were considered safe to enter Sydney. Many died there, and stories abound that the place is haunted: “equipment there records / The voices in the dormitories and wards, / Although it’s years abandoned. Undeleted, / What happened is embedded and repeated, // Or so they say” (202). The skeptical reflection, delayed until the beginning of the new stanza, is nicely placed. Edgar’s former lover was not mistrustful of the dead’s power to cling to the world, however: “You said you heard the presence which oppugned / Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion / In your lost house.” (“Oppugned”? Yes, Edgar has an extensive vocabulary and is not afraid to use it.) But the poet himself can accommodate the belief only by way of technology. The final stanza runs:

            Here in the dark
I listen, tensing in distress, to each
    Uncertain fragment of your speech,
    Each desolate, half-drunk remark
        You uttered unaware
That this cassette was running and would share
Far in the useless future your despair
With one who can do nothing but avow
You spoke from midnight, and it’s midnight now. (203)

The word “midnight” in the last line is no longer the simple temporal marker that we encountered in the first line of the poem; it is also a dark emotional state shared across decades by the two lovers, though not in the same way or for the same reasons. Among the many things to admire in this stanza, not the least is the careful choice of the almost retiring adjective “useless.” What was to be the future for the woman can have no effect on her now, and the speaker’s present gives him no way of comforting either her or himself.  

Stephen Edgar, now seventy years of age, has assembled a body of work that is as durable as any poetry written in his generation. If we read it steadily from Queuing for the Mudd Clubb (1985) to Background Noise (2020), we encounter a poet who apparently knew from the beginning what he wanted to do. His gifts were already fully apparent, and the decades have only helped him to refine and extend them. The Strangest Place is a book to read and re-read; it invites us to choose the poems that most pierce us and to get them by heart. Robert Schumann famously reviewed Chopin’s “Variations on Mozart’s ‘Là ci darem la mano’” in 1831. In that piece, he imagined his character Eusebius entering his room where he was sitting at the piano with his friend Florestan. Pointing to Chopin’s score in his hand, Eusebius declared, Hut ab, ihr Herren, ein Genie [“Hats off, gentlemen, a Genius”]. We don’t say such things these days, not wearing hats, not being so dramatic, and having rather exalted ideas of genius, but had he been around today Eusebius might have been just as enthusiastic had he brought into a room a copy of Edgar’s new book. 

KEVIN HART is internationally recognised as a poet, critic, philosopher and theologian. Born in England, he grew up in Brisbane, and taught Philosophy and English at the University of Melbourne. He has recently taken up a position at the University of Virginia.