February 26, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments
Empathy
By Hoa Pham
MIT Press
ISBN 9781913380618
Reviewed by JUDITHH HUANG
In Empathy, a speculative fiction novel that blends some of the most potent concerns in our post-pandemic world, Hoa Pham has created a dystopia in which unethical medical
experiments involving human cloning and mass pharmaceutical control are not just
practiced but accepted as a given. In this paranoia-soaked novel, we follow two young
women, Vuong in Vietnam and My in Germany, in interlacing narratives centred around
their experience of Empathy, the latest psychotropic drug permeating the party scene in the
nightclubs of Berlin.
Vuong is one of five clones (termed “multiples” in the novel’s parlance) brought up by the
shadowy Department in Vietnam. One of two multiples living in Vietnam, she is also
employed by the Department as a psychology researcher. When we first meet her, she is
meeting the other Vietnam-based multiple, Lien, who has been kept in far more deprived
circumstances and who has just murdered her foster father for killing and eating pigs. With
this bang of an opening we are plunged into a world of clandestine government operatives,
Hui circles that may have ties to Cold War spy agencies, and international conspiracies
involving mood-altering drugs.
Meanwhile, My meets Truong in Berlin, a bad boy complete with ponytail and dragon
tattoo, and predictably falls for him when he gives her Empathy at a nightclub. These two
narratives are intriguing enough to propel the reader through the book to uncover the
conspiracy behind Empathy, the secret of its origins and the purpose for its distribution.
To this reader, one of the most compelling themes of the book was the authenticity of
emotion. Hoa Pham depicts the delicate line between real and synthetic emotion in her
characters’ minds with a deft hand. This is especially resonant to me, as my experience with
taking psychiatric drugs has meant a constant questioning of the authenticity of my
emotions. In the book, emotional responses are affected by Empathy the drug as well as the
“organic” Empathy that courses through the veins of the five multiples, leading to an
ecstatic sense of connection as well as discomfort at the blurred lines of consent. The line
between mental health and illness under the influence of Empathy, and the question of
whether My’s paranoia is justified, is also a thread that runs through the book.
Closely related to this is the push and pull between individualism and group identity,
perhaps best understood in the multiples. Separated at age five, Vuong and Lien in Vietnam,
Geraldine in Australia and Khanh and Giang in Aotearoa/New Zealand have an insatiable
longing for each other, a longing which eclipses their various romantic partnerships. Khanh
and Giang were raised as a pair, and share an extraordinary bond. When the question
becomes whether the distilled essence of this bond, the drug Empathy, can lead to world
peace through the sublimation of individual identity, even the multiples, who have been
raised their whole lives as laboratory experiment subjects, seem to favour the use of
Empathy to control the population.
The multiples themselves present an interesting “quintuplet study” of what happens when
identical clones are raised in laboratory conditions in Asia versus the West, with two of
them brought up in Asia while the other three were brought up in Australia and
Aotearoa/New Zealand. Geraldine, the Australian multiple, and Khanh and Giang, the
“twins” brought up in Aotearoa, move with greater privilege and self-assurance than the
Vietnamese multiples, being assured of the rights of their citizenships even though they are
still clearly highly manipulated test subjects. The implications that unethical experiments are
“outsourced” to poorer countries with fewer legal safeguards, and that democracies
enshrine certain individual rights better, are clear.
But even Vuong notes that, when all five are linked through their natural Empathy, “the
majority would get their way” (p 163) because of how overwhelming their influence is with
the heightened connection – perhaps in itself a critique of majority rule in a democracy.
Where the novel succeeds most is in conveying the paranoia, control and surveillance that
test subjects in a government program live under. Human clones raised as lab rats for life in
a developing country where not too much scrutiny is paid seems eerily plausible in our
world. Hoa Pham creates an atmosphere of oppressive control in details like Vuong being
shocked at Lien’s statement,
“We don’t talk about the past here. We talk about the future, what we’re going to
become.”
The Department mantra coming from Lien’s mouth without a hint of irony frightened
me.
(p8)
This atmosphere is again present in the jokes that are more than jokes, which reveal
anxieties about rumoured horrors: the “running joke that they did interrogations on the
higher levels. At least, we thought it was a joke.” (p32) These small details of hearing
government slogans parroted back even by the Department’s victims, and the gallows-
humour jokes that are a coping mechanism in the face of unscrupulous authorities, are
familiar to me as someone who grew up in another tightly-controlled Southeast Asian
country, Singapore, and deeply relatable.
The double-edged sword of Empathy in the novel (and empathy in our world) is revealed in
the fact that too much empathy leads to the murder of the foster father in the first chapter,
as Lien thinks of the pigs raised in that household as “we” as well – i.e. she identifies with
them as much as with her fellow multiples. “You can’t show the same empathy to animals
as humans and survive. Not in Viet Nam, anyway.” (p11) Can too much empathy become a
problem? Does it lead to weakness, or even violence? And if it can lead to world peace, is
that at too great a cost to individual liberty and autonomy? These are the questions that
Hoa Pham presents us with. But does she succeed in exploring them?
Empathy has a page-turning quality, but perhaps suffers from its fast pacing. Certain
revelations can feel rushed, without enough development to make them feel real. In
particular, My’s motivation is a little lacking and her decision to undertake certain drastic
actions in aid of Truong’s drug ring was not believable, given that she is not pressed for
money and doesn’t trust Truong.
A later plot twist that relies on My being an unreliable narrator is also both too telegraphed
and unconvincing, and the final chapter, which brings Vuong’s entire narrative and the
reality of more than half the cast into question, is also disappointing in relying on the trope
of mental illness leading to delusions, and undermines the compelling themes that Hoa
Pham built in the world of the book.
The Department, the main antagonist of the book, also seems ubiquitous without ever
feeling like a real threat, as the main characters manage to undertake many actions without
significant barriers. The Department’s omniscient and omnipresent nature is certainly
unsettling, and feeds into the paranoid atmosphere, but it never actually rises to the level of
an existential threat.
Hoa Pham’s prose is workmanlike, functioning like Orwell’s window-pane, but occasionally
veers into the lyrical, especially when describing the experience of being inside a multiple’s
head and thinking as “we”. However, sometimes when plot developments are introduced in
the default matter-of-fact voice, the tone and abruptness blunts their impact. As a result,
this is an action-packed novel, very rapidly paced and lacking in description or space to
digest the implications of certain plot points.
The book also touches on the proliferation of conspiracy theories and vaccine paranoia in
the wake of the pandemic, particularly when the multiples seek to go public with their
existence only to have the only channels open to their story be conspiracy sites. However,
while this is touched on, not much is made of the point. Thus Empathy is a post-pandemic
novel that acknowledges the rifts in culture since the culture wars over conspiracy theories,
anti-vaxxers, and fake news without really endorsing any side.
Hoa Pham also centres the Vietnamese diaspora experience in the book, with parents’ Hui
circles as networks, My dating a fellow Vietnamese-German Truong but being questioned by
her mother if his family was from the North or the South, and a particularly poignant
mother-daughter relationship where My wishes for Empathy-like closeness with a mother
who barely communicates about her life and is hardly seen between her shifts at work. My’s
bisexuality is also introduced in a matter-of-fact way, although her romances are, again, a
bit rushed. This queer representation without any angst or fanfare is much appreciated.
Upon closing the book, this reader is left with a deep sense of unease. A lot of emotions are
attributed to Empathy, whether in the veins of the multiples or induced through the heart-
shaped drugs. But in empathizing with these characters, some of whom may or may not be
entirely imaginary, what settles in is a sense of helplessness in the face of the shadowy
powers that be. Perhaps that is the prevailing sentiment in the world after the ravages of
the pandemic, with its lockdowns, near-mandatory vaccines and dystopian slogans. If so,
then Empathy has distilled that sense of helplessness into a pill. Would you take it?
JUDITH HUANG is an Australian-based Singaporean author, poet, literary and science fiction translator, composer, musician, serial-arts-collective-founder, Web 1.0 entrepreneur and VR creator @ www.judithhuang.com. Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, was shortlisted for the EBFP 2017 and Singapore Book Awards 2019. A three-time winner of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award, Judith graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in English and American Literature and Language and taught creative and academic writing at the Harvard Writing Center and Yale-NUS College. She has published original work in Prairie Schooner, Asia Literary Review, Portside Review, Creatrix, The South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, QLRS and Cha as well as being a founding member of the Spittoon Collective and magazine in China, which currently has branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an, Dali, Tucson (AZ, USA) and Gothenburg (Sweden).
February 3, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments
Me, Her, Us
by Yen Rong Wong
UQP
ISBN 9780702266201
Reviewed by ZHI YI SAW
Me, Her, Us, by award-winning non-fiction writer and art critic Yen-Rong Wong, is her debut collection of memoir-essays that centres around her investigation and views of various relationships: Her own with sex (Me), her relationship with her mother (Her), and the wider relationship between Asian women and sex (Us). Much of Wong’s previous works also tackled similar subject matters of race, gender, and family from the perspective of a Chinese-presenting woman, like “Things Left Unsaid,” winner of the 2022 Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer. Through a myriad of statistics, media critique, and personal anecdotes; she offers an unfiltered look at Australian society and the Chinese diaspora on their treatment and internalised expectations set on Asian women.
Many expectations in Chinese culture are implied, inherently known. Parents aren’t expected
to have “the talk” with their children nor are there any loud communal sermons in immigrant
Chinese communities that promote, instruct on, or lambast the act. Only silent judgement. It’s
simultaneously an issue that belongs to the private and the collective. To be kept to yourself,
yet family and culture are supposed to be taken into consideration. Breaking through this
lens, Yen-Rong Wong de-stigmatises the taboo of sex by humorously detailing her path of
sexual exploration, from masturbating in her childhood home to being suspended by rope
nude above fellow partygoers in a Melbourne warehouse.
Wong aims to normalise the concept of female pleasure during sex, typically seen as of lesser
importance to the male orgasm if not an outright myth. She recalls deliberately not making
noise during sex, curbing her bodily functions, because she was afraid of inconveniencing
other people, as Chinese women were raised to be “quiet and obedient” (31). Instead, she
could only truly express herself in her lonesome, through masturbation. The ability to control
every aspect of sex was a revolutionary, if accidental, discovery for her.
My masturbatory adventures in that big empty house gave me my first taste of
freedom – of being in control of my body and my sexual pleasure. I was able
to be as loud as I wanted while I did whatever I wanted, a concept that was
foreign to me at the time. (27)
Despite her newfound independence, lack of sexual education nearly leads to serious injury
from experimentation with various household items. From this experience, Wong emphasises
the need for the increased prominence of female sexual education as well as reliable support
groups that can provide clearance and safety. As Wong grew away from her parents, she
would enter more open and accepting social circles, allowing her more freedom to explore
her sexuality. Through attending numerous sex parties, she would discover an unusual sense
of emancipation, ironically, in bondage. Specifically, a feeling of powerlessness in an
environment where she knows her consent and wellbeing are respected. Wong details the
enchanting freedom felt in her rope-bound flight over a BDSM scene:
“I feel something approximating relief; I feel more myself than I can ever imagine being when I’m on the
ground.” (74).
As Wong engages in self-discovery as an individual in Australia, her connection with her
Chinese roots and parents wanes. Part of this comes from the author’s loss of her language,
resulting in a “loss of identity they [children of immigrants] can’t ever really get back” (113).
The disappearance of her language doesn’t just entail forgetting the words but also the correct
contexts and tones for their intended meanings.
Throughout the text, sentences and paragraphs are made up of Chinese characters, dialogue
from Wong’s parents and passages from literary works. When presupposing a hypothetical
conversation with her mother where she suggests being more open on the subject of sex like
westerners, her mother replies, “那昃外國人的想法我們華人不會講這的話” (34) or “We
Chinese won’t talk about what foreigners think”. With few exceptions, closure from
accompanying translation isn’t provided. Though the meaning can sometimes be inferred
through context, parts of this book will remain a mystery to much of its English-speaking
readers. This feeling of loss and missing out that Wong feels in losing her language, identity,
and means of communication with her parents is thus creatively thrust onto the reader.
Beyond the linguistic gap is her mother’s emotional guardedness, her desire to maintain the
persona of the domineering authority figure over her daughter. In childhood, Wong’s mother
would cane her for speaking out of line. In adulthood, their “clashes were never loud but they
were still venomous, barbs traded through glances, a roll of the eyes, or malicious
compliance” (83).
Wong laments the experiences she will never have with her mother due to the language
barriers and emotional restriction. She longs for the emotional outpour and clear
understanding, like the western mothers and daughters on her TV have. What she couldn’t
express in the complexities of person, Wong has tried through text.
I’m just glad to have this opportunity to talk back to my mother, to say all the
things I wasn’t able to say when I was younger, and all the things I don’t think
I’ll be ever able to say to her in person. This is my way of being heard; by
getting it all down on paper, I’m releasing all these things that have been left
unsaid, allowing myself to name then on my own terms, to make them real.
(136)
Despite the personal catharsis felt, Wong also contemplates the ethical dilemma of writing
out her personal experiences with her Chinese family. Part of this stems from being raised
under a two-millennia-old regiment of filial piety focused on “face” and family reputation,
many times at the cost of emotional repression. With the advent of globalisation and being
part of an immigrant family in the Brisbane suburbs, a whole new dimension arises that
agonisingly plagues any critical lens on Asian home life. Was she contributing to
orientalisation? Through her incidental portrayal of her mother as a strict overachieving
matriarch, was she lending credence to the “tiger mom” stereotype?
Wong delicately explores the complexities of presenting Asian subjectivity to the Australian
mainstream, careful to avoid advocacy for either cultural relativism or civilising missions. As
she points out the issues with many Asian cultures’ treatment of women, she remains wary of
the historical use of perceived backwardness by colonial states to justify their subjugation and
dehumanisation of subjects, so often populations in the Global South.
Wong contextualises the place of Asians in western society and their relation to whiteness.
Many Asians see it as both an aspiration and something to avoid to protect their culture.
Asian women are called “race traitors” for dating white men, Asian men will seek white
women as status symbols to counter their own perceived emasculation, and Asian
communities historically attacked other racial minorities to become the “model minority”
(198). Model for who though?
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks explores race relations in the context of colonialism
and the tendency of colonised and non-white men to develop an inferiority complex. Fanon
notes how they seek approval from white society through imitation, speaking, dressing, and
having sex like white men (9); to put on a new face. The pursuit of white women becomes a
reclamation of something lost, masculinity in the case of Asian men, “By loving me, she [the
white woman] proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I
am a white man” (45). It’s through this craving for whiteness that many oppressed peoples
tear each other down. The fight for Asian rights therefore mustn’t rally around or defend its
patriarchal practices but seek to confront them, only then can progress be made.
Me, Her, Us offers blunt and biting critiques on the treatment of Asian women by wider
Australian society and their respective cultural enclaves. The main remedy to patriarchy and
racism recommended in the book is exposure. Exposure to female bodily functions, exposure
to female sexual pleasure, and exposure to Asian women. Through her book, Yen-Rong
Wong breaks the rule of face and lays herself bare for all to see. The complexities of warmth
and coldness that melded in on each other to create a Chinese family that was neither hell nor
heaven but one that existed within its circumstance. Despite the utilisation of numerous
academic sources to contextualise her observations, Wong avoids their sterile and sometimes
patronising language. Her first-person voice, coated with humour and familiarity throughout,
creates an egalitarian relationship with readers. Not only is the author’s knowledge imparted
on the reader, but also her anxieties, questions, and unknowns. Rather than an “objective”
western anthropologist eyeing the mysterious and exotic Orient from afar for the benefit of a
solely western audience, she’s a subject that has taken over the study.
Though the book begins with a declaration of its intention being for young Asian women, it
provides important insights for people outside of this segment in society. Me, Her, Us ends
with rousing intersectional calls to action: for Asian women to not just be seen but also heard,
for white readers to tear down the veil of otherness and seek understanding, and for all of her
“yellow fellows” (220) to know they’re not alone.
Citation
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
ZHI YI SAW is a 23-year old writer from Penang, Malaysia. He has an interest in historical fiction and non-fiction works concerning the postcolonial period and the resulting explorations of new identities. He is currently an international student studying for a Master’s degree in creative writing at Macquarie University. He also graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2023.
February 2, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments
The World With Its Mouth Open
Zahid Rafiq
Tin House
ISBN 9781959030850
Reviewed by AASHNA JAMAL
The men are restrained and evasive, the women are waiting for something that never arrives. A sense of resignation pervades the eleven short stories in Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story book collection, The World With Its Mouth Open published by Tin House. “He hadn’t lowered the memory of his brother into the earth, and I couldn’t shoulder his grief.”(‘Bare Feet’, p.58). Zahid’s characters are grounded in their own narratives, but Kashmir, Srinagar, with its majestic vistas are ever present, in stark contrast to stories, taut and simple, lived in a land where indigenous political aspirations are muted.
Zahid’s collection does away with what is expected of a writer from a region of conflict. His stories are not about the gun; no one other than Kashmiris take the limelight and in their labour of living, the reader becomes an unwieldy witness, for once we have seen, we cannot look away. One of Zahid’s influences is Flannery O’Connor and much like her celebrated short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Zahid’s primary characters do not want to yield sympathy, but in the face of difficult well drawn secondary characters, they cannot help but engage, often losing a part of themselves in the process. People might protect themselves, defences up, but it’s in their relations with others that they flounder till they are completely ensnared. In ‘The Man with the Suitcase’ a son stops fighting with his mother who is waiting for her other dead son. Afterall, he too looks for signs everywhere, following a man he has never seen or spoken to before.
The collection explores the stillness and acceleration of Kashmir, taking us through narrow alleyways which Zahid seems to know well. His stories are a gradual unravelling of different kinds of lives all drawn from the same spool. Deft sentences bring uncanny sight to the reader. The city is a character, its bylaws, its people, their eyes, the sounds, even crows and dogs. The characters know them intimately – a journalist browsing a papier-mâché shop in ‘Small Boxes’, a boy looking at descending birds in ‘Crows’ – and by the end of the collection, the reader starts beginning to understand how people are placed on this vast canvas. Only just. Zahid’s work is an injunction for those who try to distil Kashmir into a singular experience, a unitary problem. Readers are not promised full comprehension. That’s their homework on their own time.
Zahid is excellent at drawing inner monologues. Thoughts gather, circumambulate, meander and then keep returning to the central worry of the character, building like a crescendo, often ending in futility, as his writing keeps showing so much is out of our hands in a place like Kashmir, where individual wants are tempered by the limits of spatiality.
‘Drops of water slipped down the tall glass, just as they had on those Pepsi bottles …She had never understood where the water came from, believing for a long time that it oozed from the inside, but then she knew better, and yet she had never found out where it really came from.’
(‘The Bridge’, p.14.)
Themes of fear and want go hand in hand in all the stories. People persist in what they desire, exulting in the scariness of not knowing and going in headfirst anyway. They all want more than is given to them, political or material: Nusrat, a woman seeking a hakeem after multiple miscarriages; a boy who fears his tuition teacher; an inquisitive young man swept by the thoughts of the neighbour’s daughter; Mansoor, a shopkeeper whose new mannequin looks sad; Mr. Hussain, a refined store owner who becomes paranoid about death and mothers and brothers who wait for those who will not come back. Zahid moves the needle away from pedantic headlines about Kashmir to a spotlight on its restive veins – blue, maroon and pink, its people, vesting them with unabashed agency:
‘a little earthworm had been torn into two. ‘They will both live,’ she said. ‘Now there will be two of them.’
(‘Flowers from a Dog’, p.85.)
The women are often referred to by their social standing in association with a man – ‘Sham Saeb’s wife’ in ‘Flowers from a Dog’, ‘the owner’s wife’ in ‘The House’, ‘his wife’ in ‘The Mannequin’. But I liked these nameless women, precisely because they understand their place in the system and subvert it:
‘In my husband’s absence?’ She stared at him. ‘Is that possi-ble? I am a woman, after all. I can’t decide on my own.’
(‘The House’, p.106.)
The ‘owner’s wife’ acts obtuse when the labourer Manzoor asks decisions of her she does not want to make. Wives ask their husbands to solve things for them but the only way out of quagmires is for them to claw at the seams. Menfolk are ill-equipped to imagine what women really want. In ‘Flowers from a Dog’, a man longs for a dead woman, who has long left him. But in her leaving, she chose what she wanted; dead or alive, she was not his to own, as much as he mourns her.
In a recent interview, Zahid says ‘the best stories make us inhabit another life and thereby somehow our own, more fully, more consciously’. If there is a pervasive universal truth, his stories repeat it again and again to the reader, and you’re left longing for, and shuddering at his characters. Do we want to be them? No. Can we look away? No. Readers want to solve, to apply salve, but Zahid will not give them an opportunity:
‘… why look into its eyes, useless, to bring a dead thing to life. The dead are for the dead.’
(‘Dogs’, p.124. )
His writing is confrontational in the simplest ways, by repeating the truth again and again, across different stories, so love, grief, malice, jealousy, paranoia, all come together and we are left with an indelible feeling of what being human is.
Having grown up in Kashmir, and then not having lived there for a long time, I felt a sense of nostalgia as well as guilt. Therein, lies our hubris, as readers and altruists who want to solve Kashmir for its people. If the conflict is a constant in Kashmir, what changes? Its people. They change. They do things differently, each time, till in all timelines, they cannot be pinned down, only observed. They will save themselves if need be; by living their lives fully, as characters in stories both fictional and nonfictional, and perhaps in the real world as well.
Citations
1. 5 Questions for Zahid Rafiq, with Michelle Johnson. World Literature Today, January 2025
AASHNA JAMAL is a writer from Kashmir. Her stories appear in Fountain Ink, Muse India, Caravan, Inverse Journal, The diplomat, and Bebaak Jigar- Of Dry Tongues and Hearts, a print anthology of Indian fiction. She is a 2024 Sangam House writer resident and a 2022 South Asia Speaks Fellow. She is working on her debut novel. She is currently an economic advisor to the government in Somalia.
January 25, 2025 / mascara / 0 Comments
Politica 
by Yumna Kassab
Ultimo Press
ISBN: 9781761152009
Reviewed by ALISON STODDART
Coming late and virginal to Yumna Kassab’s literary work, Politica is written in what I now know is her trademark fragmentary style, something that invites the reader to commit to. But commit I did and was well rewarded with a novel of war and its subsequent fallout of
disorder.
Politica is Kassab’s latest novel and set in an unnamed country in the Middle East. It’s a
difficult read, divided into innumerable chapters and densely packed with characters, many of
whom are memorable. Each chapter’s title is a hint to deeper meaning. Titles like ‘A
Martyr’, ‘Human Shields’ or ‘An Ode to Reason’ unlock the characters. The war seen
through their eyes, creates a complex narrative on the far-reaching impact of war.
The many people who live through this turmoil, some who reappear throughout the book,
some who are referred to only once and some who aren’t even named, convey the lives of
ordinary people and the effect war has on idealism, identity and social structures.
It’s a novel alive with characters but no plot or storyline. We are brief visitors bearing
witness to Jamal, a student who desperately wants to pick up a gun and join the war effort as
an escape from the conflict at home with his father. Or the inappropriately named Yasmeena,
leader of a revolution whose name means flowers and delicate things. We get to know her
father, Abdullah who once was an idealistic political student who wanted to bring freedom to
his people.
It is through these sparsely sketched characters that we experience the atrocities of war. But
Kassab dilutes the unexplainable with stories that can be identified with. Stories of love, loss
and defiance. We are privy to villagers who visit the town’s well. People like Um Kareem
whose husband wishes to take another wife. Or Amira whose son Khaled has been killed in
the fighting, but she does not know this yet and still has hope, a misguided hope that
survivors of war cling to with feigned ignorance, because she ultimately knows that few
soldiers survives war.
These people could be anywhere. Kassab decontextualises where they are because what they
are suffering through can happen anywhere and to anyone.
War is political because it is always happening. There is no plot in this novel because,
according to Kassab, there is no beginning, middle or end to war and her novel reflects this.
The chapters in Politica are simply vignettes of humans existing in the continuous tale of
dispossession and displacement.
Many of the chapters are snapshots of an event, something that ultimately results in said
event being used to for political gain. In ‘Human Shields’ a young girl out walking with her
mother, is shot and killed even as her mother tries to shield her. But twenty years later
dispute is still raised over who was the shield and who was shielded, and how truth is the first
sacrifice. ‘The mother’s name was Fatin and her daughter’s name was Rayan. These are
facts. The rest is a feast for the dogs. In this way Kassab portrays how war turns all aspects
of human existence into fuel for propaganda.
In between these chapters of each character are interspersed brief paragraphs of insight.
Kassab is adept at profound explanations of attributes of war. From propaganda, ‘how do you
strip people of their culture? First you take their language and then you outlaw their beliefs’,
to the futility of war ‘once injustice is dead, it will find life somewhere else’.
The sparsely written prose is allegorical in places. The sentences are sharp and complex
which often requires a rereading to grasp the meaning. Kassab cuts off any narrative just as
you start to work out. If you are not interested in plot but enjoy vignettes with insight, then
this is the novel for you.
So where does Politica fit in current society? As of the time of this review the Gaza war is in
its second year, the Russia/Ukraine war grinds on and the world is about to have a new leader
of the free world who wants to own Greenland and may not rule out military might to do this.
It is an apposite time to read this novel. It’s a timely book about war when the world is
undergoing more than enough. ‘The personal is political’ is the opening quote of this book.
But everything is political if you make it that way.
Kassab is Australian, born and raised in the western suburbs of Sydney and, interestingly for
someone so literary, is also a science teacher. She has been appointed the City of
Parramatta’s first Laureate in Literature, a position she will use to write about growing up in
the diverse community of Parramatta.
She attributes her sense of self to being raised in this multicultural area of Sydney but not
entirely because of the family and friends surrounding her. It is her fascination with the
community that grew up around the emergence of the football team, Western Sydney
Wanderers that cemented her love for the west. In an interview with ABC Online’s
Rosemary Bolger, Kassab observes ‘it kind of centred the community, and people who
previously wouldn’t have said they were from the area, suddenly were saying they were from
the area’. Kassab’s interest in how communities can unite, and regions re-emerge in
favourable circumstances are themes that can be found in Politica. Dispossession and
displacement can be stopped.
Sonia Nair in her review for the Sydney Morning Herald points out the tie between the power
plays of the western world with the wars of the middle east. Sometimes war is a short-term
act of violence to achieve a specific aim, but Kassab does not believe dictators or
revolutionists rain down from the sky. She is more aware of the prolonged impact of war and
the way it echoes down the generations.
Would I recommend this novel? This is not a story. If you are someone who likes decoding
literary writings and revelling in the discovery of literary devices, then Kassab is your author.
If however, you are the type who likes to pick up an airport novel for reading on the beach
then perhaps Politica is a step too far
Undeniably, this is a worthy book. An erudite reader that can put in the effort to discover
Kassab’s insightful prose will benefit from its resonance. It’s a difficult book that rewards
perseverance. A second read of this novel provided more clarity and understanding of
Kassab’s worldliness and she writes against a background of humanity, and what it means to
be part of a collective. Politica offers profound reflections on the convergence of politics and
the individual. Kassab makes is clear that choice in war is idiosyncratic, and the personal cost
of that choice is forever borne.
ALISON STODDART is a country born and bred, Sydney writer currently undertaking a master’s degree at Macquarie University which she is hoping to finish soon. She completed her BA Degree majoring in Creative Writing in 2020.
Twitter @a_hatz5
December 22, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Stamatia X
by Effie Carr
ISBN: 9780648170716
Primer Fiction
Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI
Stamatia X is a novel fuelled by Greek philosophy, grammar, poetry and history to tell the riveting story of a Greek-Australian, migrant family’s return to their “homeland”. Nostalgia has no place to dwell in this book as the family of five return to civil unrest, violence and the absurd, rampant malpractice of a military dictatorship. The year of their return to Greece is 1973. This is the year of pent up, popular protest against the ruling colonels, when students occupied the Athens Polytechnic calling themselves the “Free Besieged”, demanding “Bread-Education-Liberty!”But then to be brutally bulldozed by a tank crashing the gates of the Polytechnic, leading to deaths, including 24 civilians. In the chapter titled, “17 November”, Effie Carr utilises the complexities of her main character, Stamatia, to reimagine this definitive historical event – the outcome is extraordinary.
Although Effie Carr’s Stamatia X was formally released in 2018, it wasn’t until 2019 at the Greek Writers’ Festival, based in Melbourne, that the book gained wider recognition among the literary community. It went on to be highly commended for the Book Prize 2019 by the Greek-Australian Cultural League. With its intricate weave of mythology, history and use of grammatical trope, it’s certainly deserving of a larger, international readership.
The third-person narration begins in 1970s Australia and is mostly told through Stamatia, a 13-and-a-half-year-old female, born in NSW of Greek migrants. Stamatia in Greek means “stop”. Stamatia is keenly aware of her father’s disappointment in her gender as he wanted his firstborn to be a son: “She thought her name was appropriate given that her father wanted to stop having any more female children” (9). Greek Orthodox patriarchal traditions are questioned through Stamatia’s intellect and distinct gift for learning. She has a photographic memory and significant synesthesia, enabling her to effortlessly recite the entire 158 stanzas of the ‘Hymn to Liberty’, a poem written by Dionysios Solomos, which is used as Greece’s national anthem. Her mother, Maria, despairs at Stamatia’s intellectual capacity:
Why did Stamatia have to be this way? She thought Stamatia had to learn to conform and become more selfless. Or else, be forced into it. No good could come of such an individualistic nature. There were more prospects in silent conformity. (36)
After Vasili’s alcoholic dejection at Stamatia’s birth, he grows to rely on his daughter’s resourcefulness and “studious disposition” (39). As the first born and the daughter, Stamatia is in the unenviable position of “parentifying” Vasili with his decision to return to Greece. In a surge of emotion, Vasili pushes the responsibility of making the decision to return to Greece onto Stamatia, and she unfortunately accepts:
She felt ashamed for him, that he was so confused and troubled. She was angry. She felt lost. She was floating in a vacuum… It was her decision, her journey now. She would have to make it her journey. By force if necessary. (39)
With resonances to Odysseus’s journey of return, Stamatia has quests and challenges to face before she disembarks in Greece. In particular, she is expected to know the Greek language as fluently as a well-educated, Athenian-born speaker. For the past four years she has been “in training”, “much like an Olympic athlete” (21). Vasili believes it’s imperative that his daughter “assimilate into the Greek high school system” (22) and so Stamatia is tutored rigorously for two hours, three times per week, by the perfectionist, Mr Lalas, a classics expert with one seeing eye “who had fled from Greece when the Junta had staged a military coup in 1967”(14).
The relationship between Mr Lalas and Stamatia is intriguing as it wavers between mutual respect (as if they’re philosophical peers) to one of mutual antipathy, as they labour over gruelling grammatical rules:
Stamatia loved studying the stories of the revered books, but found the endless conjugation of verbs and the outrageously huge tome of classical irregular verbs tedious and oppressive. (15)
As Stamatia conjugates verbs – delivering them from the past to the past continuous, and from the present to the present continuous – she realises her life seems stuck in the continuous present, the constant act of here and now without any sense of future.
In another reflective lesson with Mr Lalas, they explore the meaning of the word epistrophe. Although commonly known as a noun, its etymology is Greek and it means “to return”, “to turn upon” and further:
In music it meant a refrain, to return to an original melody. It was one word with so many possibilities. She loved that Greek had the capacity for expanded meaning. One small word could mean so much. (17)
This word, epistrophe, services the novel’s narrative arc splendidly. Its literal meaning in Greek is “turning about” which is what the final chapter conveys. As the story returns to the original migration from Greece to Australia. The journey embarked on by Vasili and Maria aboard the famous ship, the Patris, is told mainly through Maria, the young wife and mother-to-be. Maria is pregnant with her first born, Stamatia. As a developing foetus, Stamatia, expresses her dilemma from the womb:
How do I keep my head above water? I’m suspended yet connected to a giant placenta ball, which is connected to her. She feeds me. Breathes for me. Could I play with the placenta ball? Will this make me a boy? It could be good practice for when I’m in the park with my father. My mother is so worried. (238)
The refrain throughout the novel is how parental expectations of, and roles for, a Greek daughter are unequal and unfair in comparison to that of a Greek son. Stamatia’s two younger siblings are boys, and although they are not teenagers yet, their world of toys and games doesn’t seem to be compromised by responsibility or duty. Indeed, this story of inequality for Greek-Australian females within the Greek Orthodox social code is acknowledged through oral histories, news articles, the arts and literature. On a personal level, my own experience as the eldest daughter of a conservative Cypriot Greek household aligns with Stamatia’s discrimination and mistreatment.
Significantly, Effie Carr’s detailed rendering of Stamatia shows a multi-faceted character preventing shallow tendencies towards pitying women from culturally diverse backgrounds who experience oppression. Stamatia is both fascinating and feisty. Even as a six-year-old, she recognises the painful truth “that she had been supplanted, uprooted in her parents’ affection”(63) by the birth of her younger brother, Christos. But this little girl doesn’t hide from her anger and jealousy as she tries in desperate ways to regain her parents’ love and attention. There is her failed attempt to smother Christos with a pillow and then developing an eating disorder:
Stamatia realised that it was easy to stick her fingers down her throat and purge the
small quantities of food she was forced to eat. It was strangely satisfying to be able to do this. The reaction she got from her parents thrilled her. This was the final straw for Stamatia’s mother, who made an appointment with a child psychologist. (71)
From birth, Stamatia was destined to interrogate the status quo with her inquisitive mind and thirst for knowledge, therefore attempts to erase her identity and dignity are her epistrophe. The X after her name is apt. In Greece, when her father is ludicrously imprisoned by the corrupt regime, her status is elevated as her father’s saviour. She gives a most precious medallion, her only connection to her deceased Grandmother (Yiayia) Fotini, in exchange for her father’s release.
Still, on another level, we come to understand “the X factor” that drives Stamatia as human and signifies her as symbol. Her female body is acknowledged and activated in a sexual encounter in Greece with Philip, an 18-year-old. Although she is four years younger, she takes the lead, but panics when she hears her mother’s urgent voice, as she realises she’s no longer a virgin. She decides that her destiny differs from that of her mother’s: “She never wanted to marry a nice Greek man.” (128)
Stamatia’s story is also part of “the Greek continuous past” (112) as the novel is interspersed with vivid stories and memorable characters within the context of Greece during WWII, including its civil unrest and military dictatorship (during the early to mid-20th century). There’s Yiayia Fotini with her colourful dresses and swimming regime, the poignant war story of Giovanni Modeno and Sophia, as told through young Vasili, and the explosive incident that caused a gifted and political Lalas to lose his eye.
Stamatia X is another creative documentation of Greece’s history. One that doesn’t shy from showing complete systemic failure for Greeks who stayed and those who returned. It places the Greek daughter squarely in the foreground as she navigates between duties to her family and their country and finally, to herself.
ANGELA COSTI is known as Αγγελικη Κωστη among the Cypriot diaspora, which is her heritage and ancestry. She is a poet, playwright, reviewer and essayist. Her latest poetry book is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, Spinifex 2021. Her latest chapbook is Adversarial Practice, Cordite Poetry Review, May 2024.
December 9, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
A Brief History of Australian Terror
By Bobuq Sayed
ISBN
Common Room Editions
Reviewed by DAVID COADY
Bobuq Sayed, a non-binary member of the Afghan diaspora, has put together a brief chapbook of three essays on Islamophobia in Australia. This is a timely and insightful contribution to public debate. The subject, however, cries out for a full-length book, updated to address the surge of Islamophobia since the beginning of the Gaza genocide.
Sayed briefly mentions that Islamophobia in Australia can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but his focus is on recent history, especially the history of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Sayed writes about the subject from a highly personal perspective. This is appropriate because it touches his identity closely, especially his identity as a Muslim person of colour; it is also an identity which is glaringly under-represented in Australian public debate. I think it is appropriate that this review should be equally personal. Of course, there is no shortage of people such as myself (white, straight, cis males, brought up in a mostly Christian culture) being given platforms to opine about this, and every other conceivable, topic. Nonetheless, this is the only perspective from which I can write, and any attempt to adopt an objective stance toward a highly subjective book would miss the point of it.
Sayed writes that “a white Australian could have made the exact same criticisms” of Australian Islamophobia that he and other people of colour have made “with none of the accompanying backlash (p. 35)”. That seems to me to be a slight exaggeration. What is true is that white Australians face much less backlash than non-white Australians when they speak out against Islamophobia. After all, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Antoinette Lattouf were sacked by the national broadcaster for hurting the feelings of Islamophobes and racists, while Laura Tingle was merely reprimanded and forced to undergo “counselling” for essentially the same thing. But less backlash is not no backlash, and many white Australians have been deterred from speaking out against Israel’s genocide, out of fear of negative social and professional consequences; and both the genocide itself and the repercussions for speaking out against it are, to a great extent, the product of Islamophobia. Yet, precisely because the backlash white people face for speaking out is less, our obligation to do so is all the greater, and the silence of many of us can only be understood as timidity and, in some cases, cowardice.
The backlash against people of colour who speak out is even greater when they have, like Sayed, been granted political asylum in Australia; in which case they are expected “to tow a respectful line” to the country that gave them sanctuary (p. 34). This expectation, of course, ignores Australia’s role in creating refugees in the first place. It is particularly outrageous to expect Afghan refugees, like Sayed, to refrain from criticising the Australian government, given that Australian troops have recently been found by the Brereton Report to have committed numerous atrocities against unarmed Afghans.
Sayed has the courage to talk about Australia as a perpetrator of terror and about Muslims as its victims. This is, of course, a reversal of conventional wisdom, according to which terrorism is, almost by definition, carried out by Muslim insurgents who “enact callous bloodshed against American and European powers for no reason other than their hatred of our freedom and our wealth” (p. 24). As Sayed says, the purveyors of this conventional wisdom are not only committed to a demonstrably false account of the actual motivations of those usually categorised as ‘terrorists’, they are also oblivious to the fact that the freedom and wealth which these ‘terrorists’ allegedly hate come to a great extent “at the expense of the rest of the world, whose resources, labour and land are expropriated” (p. 25).
Sayed is keenly aware of how dangerous this ignorance is. He points out that Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People” is virtually unknown in America or elsewhere in the West. This letter makes it clear that 9/11 was, to a great extent, motivated by the occupation of Palestine. Sayed quotes bin Laden’s own words on the subject:
The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(p. 28)
Sayed is not an apologist for bin Laden. He objects to bin Laden’s frequent conflation of Zionism with Judaism, and suggests that it is due to such “legitimate shortcomings that the letter is largely discounted and that its intended audience, the American people, are mostly ignorant of the fact that it even exists” (pp. 28-29).
This seems unlikely. The conflation of Zionism with Judaism, so far from being peculiar to bin Laden and his followers, is absolutely pervasive in the West. This conflation has always been central to Zionist ideology, and it has been used for the last 76 years to promote Western hegemony in the Middle East, and to smear the Palestinian solidarity movement. Most people in the West are ignorant of the actual motives of bin Laden and other Muslim insurgents, not because those insurgents conflate Zionism with Judaism (most of them don’t), but because Western governments and media outlets conflate Zionism with Judaism (and anti-Zionism with anti-semitism). Hence, we are constantly told, and a depressing number of us actually seem to believe, that indigenous resistance to ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and now genocide, must be motivated by anti-semitism. The lie that anti-semitism is principally a Muslim, rather than a European, phenomenon is central to contemporary Western Islamophobia.
Sayed is adept at identifying ways in which imperialists “dominate accounts of language and temporality” (p. 26). The automatic labelling of resistance to occupation as ‘terrorism’ is a particularly clear example of the former. Sayed says that “whether terrorism as a term is salvageable is yet to be seen (p. 12).” Unfortunately, Sayed doesn’t tell us how it could be salvaged. My own view is that the term is unsalvageable. It does no good; there seems to be nothing we can say with it that we can’t say equally well or better without it. And it does considerable harm, by systematically discrediting resistance to imperial aggression.
Public discussion of Palestine is a clear example of imperialists dominating accounts of temporality. Israel’s attack on Gaza is presented as a response to the Hamas attack of October 7 2023, while any discussion of what preceded the Hamas attack is frowned upon. Similarly, Israel’s behaviour is routinely justified by reference to the Holocaust (even though that had nothing to do with Palestinians), while few people in the West have even heard of the Nakba. In short, we can go back to October 7th, but no further, and we can go back to the early 40s, but not to 1948. Finally, we can go back to the destruction of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem, but not to subsequent millennia of largely Arab civilisation in Palestine.
Sayed is aware that not all victims of Islamophobia are Muslims. Anyone who can be racialized as Muslim is a potential target of Islamophobic hate. Sayed speaks of his family feeling compelled to try to pass as Italians, in order not to be identified as Muslims (p. 19). There is clearly a lot of overlap between Islamophobia and racism, but they are not the same thing.
It seems impossible to separate the racism from the Islamophobia in Australian attitudes to Palestinians. Islamophobia and racism work together to make Palestinians seem an undifferentiated mass, which makes it possible for us to ignore their slaughter.
Sayed has made an excellent contribution to an important topic. I’m looking forward to hearing more from this promising young writer.
DAVID COADY’s current work is on applied philosophy, especially applied epistemology. He has published on rumour, conspiracy theory, expertise, blogging, fake news, post-truth, extremism, and democratic theory. He has also published on the metaphysics of causation, the philosophy of law, climate change, cricket ethics, police ethics, fatphobia, the ethics of horror films, and ‘scientific’ whaling. He is the author of What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues, the co-author of The Climate Change Debate: an Epistemic and Ethical Enquiry, the editor of Conspiracy Theories: the Philosophical Debate, the co-editor of A Companion to Applied Philosophy and of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology.
December 6, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Translations
by Joumaana Abdu
Vintage
ISBN 9781761343872
Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA
For people in diaspora, the perceived value of our creative expression has traditionally been contingent on the telling of familiar stories. To write into the demands of “authenticity” is to perform with pre-existing notions of our identities as the baseline. The market-prescribed version of diaspora is one in which the pool of our experiences is all made of the same still water, its depth swelling with each faltered variation from the retelling of “loss-exile-return”. As a knowable thing, it’s a comfortable iteration of the foreign because it can be named; “home” as the shared contested nebula of our personhood. Yet I question, if we are to always operate with this struggle as our centre (working either to reject or affirm it) are we truly distancing ourselves from the violence of our oppression, or cementing its bind through relentless association? It is perhaps this consideration that has allowed Australian diasporic writers to stray from the confines of mainstream narratives. Picking up Translations by Jumaana Abdu, I craved to not hear a familiar story. And Abdu, a bold and poetic POC voice in Australia’s literary sphere, got close to not telling one.
Translations follows a divorced Muslim woman, Aliyah, moving to a run-down property in rural New South Wales with her young daughter. Between shifts as a nurse, Aliyah works on transforming the property with the help of a Palestinian imam hired as a farmhand, nicknamed Shep. Here, Aliyah must navigate the notion of “home” as a haunted space, as a reunion with an old friend, dreams of the previous owners, and interactions with Indigenous Peoples intensify the question of what it means to belong.
Abdu’s cited intentions with her debut novel are noble ones. Aware of the hyper-visibility of Middle Eastern and Muslim suffering, particularly in the past year, Abdu approached the representation of her characters with a commendable objective: ‘I wanted to afford my characters the dignity of ambiguity, to prove ambiguity was possible despite the demands for explanations that have infiltrated identity politics’ (1).
In refusing to exist in the loaded context of the “other”, Abdu allows herself to create in the space left by what is negated. The decision to leave Shep’s real name unknown, for example, is one such praiseworthy move towards what is traditionally only afforded to white characters: assumed neutrality.
This manifests in a refreshing depiction of the Middle Eastern/ Muslim/ female body that is not focused primarily on its experience of pain. The “neutrality” is emphasised through descriptions of Aliyah’s physical labour. When Abdu writes ‘her body had become unbearable’ (p62), it is not connected to her identity but to the corporeal; her working on the land. Cleverly, when Abdu does position the body within a meaningful framework, she relies not on the hyper specific, stereotyped experiences of WOC, but traces its sinews out to the universal.
It comes out most beautifully in her simpler sentences: ‘I forget what it’s like outside myself. Right now, out here… the wind and all the rest’ (p269).
The temptation could be there to suggest Abdu does go back on her promise of characters who ‘demand compassion without having to bleed’ (2). Aliyah recalls a traumatic miscarriage, her mother’s unexpected death, and her friend Hana is revealed to be a victim of interfamilial abuse. And yet, the foundation of universality grounds these characters’ pain in their lived experiences not as Muslim POC, but as people – or more poignantly in these instances, as women. This avoids what Edward Said called “self-orientalisation” (3), while also underscoring cultural traumas to be understood as such. Shep detailing his personal connection to Gaza, for example, is a purposeful and necessary distinction of the Palestinian experience that can be witnessed, but not claimed, by the collective. This is tenderly communicated through the imagery of a splinter in Shep’s finger, that is never removed by Aliyah, a nurse, despite repeatedly seeing it.
In play with contrasts, this physical distance between Shep and Aliyah accentuates her nearness to Hana, and it is here that Abdu’s writing truly shines. Her appreciation for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series is apparent in this portrayal of a female friendship with cosmic closeness. But more distinctly, it is the added element of religion that takes readers to a rarely represented intersection: Islam and queerness. Abiding by her premise of ambiguity, Abdu never explicitly defines the women’s relationship.
Instead, it is expressed once more through the body: ‘The girls threw their arms around each other, pressing hard to leave a mark, or better yet a scar, something lasting, something to span a vastness, to absorb and hold and revisit’ (p93).
In a novel that explores the notion of a homeland, there is something uniquely moving about two women being each other’s mooring, through distance and time. In a standout line, she writes: ‘What was a country? Here was a beautiful girl.’ (p87).
The infused undercurrents of queerness within Aliyah, a hijabi Muslim, applied in tandem with her distinctive independence and assertiveness, affords Abdu the opportunity to dispel the archetype of the Middle Eastern woman presented in traditional media. Yet this nuancing of “the Muslim woman” is unfortunately undercut by the degree to which Abdu applies strict conservativism to the relationship between Aliyah and Shep. The two cannot share a car, with Aliyah instead riding in the back of his ute. The two cannot be indoors alone, expressing the desire for a chaperone mid-conversation. They react with embarrassment when Aliyah’s 9-year-old walks in on them at the cusp of a vulnerable discussion, and they opt to utilise two iPhone cameras as a make-shift mirror so Shep can cut his own hair and be untouched by her. As the fresh fluidity and raw physical expression of Aliyah with Hana is stunted with Shep, the female-Middle Eastern-Muslim body is returned to the original politicised position Abdu had valiantly rerouted from. It is a regretful undoing of the best part of the text. A retracing of the long shadow cast by men over Aliyah, and even larger, over women.
This pervasive conservatism clashes once more against an additional element: Abdu’s understandable, but ultimately unnuanced, commitment to re-imagining Islam in the reader’s eye from beneath the Western gaze. Utilising Shep as a “translator” of Islam to the uninitiated reader, Abdu emphasises the liberal elements present in the religion – particularly feminism – in his sermon dialogue. Literarily, this poses a contradiction; Aliyah is presented as both the maverick – divorced, queer, feminist – and the conformist – willing to consider a marriage proposal from Shep’s friend who she interacts with once at a sermon. Here Abdu’s ambiguity clause results in a weakness in her character’s verisimilitude. Without knowing how Aliyah is led by her faith, and why, her varying beliefs construct her not as a person of multitudes, but one of unexplained inconsistencies.
Culturally, Abdu’s rose-tinting of Islam as a religion in line with the collective oppressed highlights an area where greater perspectives could have been considered. At a sermon where a man is raising money for Yemen, Abdu writes:
‘[He] called them my people though Aliyah knew him to be Lebanese. But the white woman on her right with a redheaded baby nodded to agree, my people, and the Bengali grandmother handing out dates on her left nodded, my people, and the children, like a pocketful of gems, nodded my people, and every Arab and Malaysian, my people, my people, with a pride so boundless it seemed that if one Lebanese man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of Yemen, then any one man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of the world.’
(p251)
By underpinning Islam as the foundation of community, belonging to the choir of voices (both displaced and not) singing “my people”, Abdu omits the voices of those who experience Islam as a force of oppression. Neglected is the historic Arab colonisation of the Middle East and beyond, the rise of extremist powers such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, the IRGC in Iran, and further Islamic theocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Mauritania, in place of a sentimentalisation of worldly kinship under Islam.
She continues:
‘Here were people who loved belonging to each other across oceans, swept into a corner of the Australian bushland, huddled in a barn doubling as a place of worship because the townspeople had no room for Pangea in the streets.’
(p251)
This emphasis on the idealised unity of diaspora, in contrast to “the townspeople”, fails to honour the book’s initial, exciting venture into the negated, universal space. It instead decorates the existing depiction of diverse peoples in Australia as a monolithic community united and isolated through our sole identifier: oppression. Perhaps most unfortunately, Abdu’s dilution of difference between those in varying forms of exile also extends to the depiction of Indigenous Australians, at one point connecting their experiences of unhomeliness to ‘hijabis in France’ (p267). The ungroundedness of this approach has a ricochet effect. Aliyah’s indigenous coworker Billie expressing belief that Shep’s Muslim mother was the spiritual reincarnation of her deceased uncle (the only Muslim she had known) comes across as a one-dimensional interpretation of Indigenous beliefs, rather than an expression of POC connection.
In Translations, Jumaana Abdu invokes the philosophies of Edward Said in writing: ‘I think it matters what people see. It depends – depends on who’s making the image, who the image is for’ (p146). A new image is quietly born in her work, and bravely so, but it is just as quietly buried. Against the aesthetic touchstones of “the Middle Eastern” – desert dunes, a headscarf turning into a flag in the wind, hardcover editions of One thousand and One Nights – Abdu’s strength in imagining a new way of belonging is muted. We are returned to those still waters, uniform and indistinguishable, denied once more the individuality afforded to whiteness. Perhaps, the alternative is a story that is yet to be translated.
NOTES
- 1.Abdu, J. (2024b) We love to dissect our ‘private lives’, but is forgoing privacy the only way to prove I am a human being? | Jumaana Abdu, The Guardian.
- 2.ibid.
- 3.Said, E.W. (1979) Orientalism. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
ROUMINA PARSA is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
November 11, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Because I am Not Myself, You See
Ariane Beeston
Black Inc
ISBN 978-1760644505
Reviewed by A.D. JOHN
I tumbled headfirst into Ariane Beeston’s beautiful, poignant, and heart-wrenching memoir, Because I’m Not Myself You See. It affected me like no book has in recent memory. I devoured it over a weekend, engrossed in a story that opened my eyes to postpartum psychosis—a condition both terrifying and isolating. Whilst reading, I was reminded of novelist and poet Alice Walker’s words: “Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.” In many ways, Beeston’s memoir is its own furious dance—a lionhearted, defiant act of poetic expression that transforms pain into a resonant story of fortitude, resilience, and healing.
This work confronts us with the unsettling realities of postpartum psychosis, a condition that endures in the background of mainstream medical discourse despite affecting countless new mothers. As a psychologist and former child protection worker, Beeston occupies a unique position—offering a rare, paradoxical insight that deepens her fears of inadequacy while arming her with the language to understand it. Her narrative is not merely a personal testament but an exposure of a societal blind spot, challenging the stigma surrounding maternal mental health.
Throughout the opening chapters of Because I’m Not Myself You See, Beeston leaves a breadcrumb trail of personal insights that, in hindsight, hint at her later diagnosis. She recounts her time on the phones at the DoCS helpline in NSW, her role as a field caseworker at a Sydney community service centre, and, most ironically, her “dream job” as a psychologist at a DoCS office in Western Sydney. These roles bring her into frequent contact with removals and the organisation of visitations for parents labelled “unfit” by the system, with her team informally referred to in the office as “The Removalists.” This nickname alone subtly foreshadows her own fears as a new mother; it’s easy to see why, after the birth of her son Henry, she becomes anxious that someone might come to take him away. Her distress deepens when she notices a rash on Henry, a sign she misinterprets through the lens of her professional experience, and her internal alarm only grows louder.
Beeston shares intimate truths, painting a raw picture of postpartum reality. From night sweats following Henry’s birth to the disquieting struggle of bonding with her newborn son, she uncovers dimensions of new motherhood that are seldom acknowledged. The pressure she feels when an instinctive connection with her child doesn’t immediately form is particularly heart-wrenching, resonating as deeply human, delicate and vulnerable.
In the chapter titled “Transference,” Beeston explores the delicate boundary where professional support blends imperceptibly with emotional enmeshment, an involvement from her doctor that disrupts the clarity of the caregiver-patient relationship. The confusion this overstepping instils within her is palpable, a reminder of the delicate balance required in therapeutic settings, where boundaries exist to protect as much as to heal. This encounter, brief as it seems, sends her spiralling, introducing a tension that will take years to unravel. Yet, as absorbing as this chapter is, Beeston chooses not to delve deeper into the complexities of transference, leaving questions unanswered about the broader implications of therapeutic attachment and the ways in which a healer’s intentions can inadvertently wound.
The memoir is not without its difficult moments. The direct and indirect accounts of loss—whether from suicide, infanticide, or neonatal death—are haunting. These stories are challenging to read, yet Beeston presents them with an unflinching honesty. They underscore the urgency of recognising maternal mental health and its wide-reaching impact, emphasising that it is a critical component of well-being for both mother and child.
Even within the darkness, Beeston finds moments of levity and resilience, drawing a chuckle from the bleakest of situations. In the chapter titled “If They Make Me Do Art Therapy,” while staying at the mother and baby psychiatric unit at St John of God Hospital in Burwood, she shares her humorous perspective on art therapy sessions.
Recovery, as Beeston reveals, is not a linear ascent but a labyrinthine journey fraught with regressions and unforeseen detours. The memoir dismantles the comforting illusion of a definitive cure, exposing the fragility of mental health and the perpetual vigilance required to maintain it. “Even after you’re better and no longer just living but thriving, if you’ve lost your mind before, you carry the fear of losing it again,” she writes. This acknowledgment disrupts conventional narratives of mental illness as a journey from sickness to cure, insisting instead on the authenticity of fluctuation—a more honest reflection of lived experience.
Equally compelling is the portrayal of her husband, Robb, who stands beside her with steadfast support throughout her journey. His unwavering compassion highlights the vital role that partners play in navigating postpartum challenges. Beeston reflects on the pressures her illness places on their relationship, acknowledging the complexities both faces. She contemplates the sacrifices Robb makes for their family—the missed opportunities—to provide stability for their son after years of “choppy waters.” His experiences underscore the need for greater awareness and support for partners, who often grapple with their own emotional struggles while striving to remain a steady source of strength.
Beeston’s literary style elevates the memoir beyond a personal account. Using techniques like epizeuxis and polysyndeton, she weaves a hypnotic rhythm into her prose. The deliberate repetition and flowing conjunctions mirror the relentless cycles of her mental health struggles, pulling readers into the pulsating heart of her experience. The memoir becomes an immersive journey, where language itself serves as a conduit for emotion, amplifying the relentlessness of postpartum psychosis.
The memoir also masterfully examines the gradual erosion of friendships. Beeston recalls the quiet drifting apart and isolation that arises when one’s world narrows to the immediacy of survival. She acknowledges her friends’ efforts to stay close yet admits to a sense of retreat as her energy is consumed entirely by caring for Henry. This honest exploration uncovers how illness can reshape relationships, fraying bonds once considered tight knit.
What distinguishes Because I’m Not Myself You See is its unflinching examination of the interconnectedness of personal and systemic challenges. Beeston does not isolate her experience within individual pathology but situates it within a broader context of cultural and institutional shortcomings. Her advocacy extends beyond the immediate challenges faced by mother and baby, thoughtfully exploring the relationships that surround them—especially those of fathers and partners. Beeston urges for a more holistic approach to mental health that considers the entire family unit.
In her introduction for the memoir at Abbey’s Bookstore, Ariane shared that this is the book she wished she’d had while going through her battle with postpartum psychosis. I believe it’s a book all parents should read. To declare this recounting “important” for parents or anyone close to them feels like an understatement. Ariane’s raw chronicle of those dark days and her journey back into the light offers not only profound insights into mental health but also a deeper understanding of this brutal and oppressive affliction, helping loved ones and partners become more prepared and supportive. Above all, this courageous work has the potential to save lives.
A. D. John is a Wiradjuri writer residing on unceded Gadigal land. He is a recipient of the 2023 Penguin Random House “Write It” Fellowship and a winner of the 2023 Writing NSW Cultivate Mentorship Program. His work has been published in Mascara Literary Review and Kill Your Darlings magazine. He is currently studying for a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.
November 4, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Thanks for Having Me
By Emma Darragh
Allen & Unwin
Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER
I cannot say I’ve ever had the eureka moment in which I found myself lost in a novel that felt like it had been written for me or had been written about the world I knew personally. Perhaps my interest in Australian fiction has unintentionally favoured rural towns, characterised by their isolation and unforgiving natural landscapes. Although these stories come close to offering something familiar, their small-town melodramas still feel worlds apart, for I do not know them in the same way I know the lower food court in the central Wollongong shopping centre, the one accessible when you get off the escalator in front of Coles, the one Vivian visits in the opening lines of Emma Darragh’s 2024 short story cycle, Thanks For Having Me.
Thanks For Having Me feels like a photo album, where every captured moment is a detailed but temporally scattered snapshot of working-class life, featuring nostalgic recollections of playing ‘doughnut on a string’ and finding hidden Christmas presents. Darragh creates a dynamic depiction of youth from the 1960s to the 2020s through strategically placed allusions to recognisable traditions, routines, and cultural attitudes. These moments of familiarity and recognition elicit intense empathy for protagonists Mary Anne, Vivian, and Evie, each of whom personifies a different epoch. While Darragh provides ongoing narration of her characters’ contemporary lives, this is often intercut with memories that create a dynamic portrayal of girlhood and womanhood. Reflecting the spirit of the times, this is a coming-of-age narrative spanning almost sixty years.
Darragh’s rendering of the Illawarra feels incredibly immersive. The short story collection transports readers across postcodes, from Vivian’s central Wollongong apartment to Mary Anne’s Berkeley home, and through bus stop, car park, and RSL club in between. Symbolic of Mary Anne’s attempted but ultimately failed escape to Sydney, Thanks For Having Me remains isolated from any grand notions of metropolitan Australia; instead, it reads as a love song to an often-overlooked city. The text’s emphasis on place as a narrative device serves as the ‘tie that binds’ the three revolving protagonists to their history, identity, and ultimately, to each other.
Darragh’s character voice and perspective, accurately and effortlessly reflect the zeitgeist occupied by her protagonists. This style is cleverly integrated into Evie’s narration when she describes Vivian’s apartment as ‘urbancore’ and describes Vivian’s tea towels as ‘aesthetic’. Character perspective is further developed in the values and beliefs of each protagonist, influenced by their environment and reminiscent of the cultural landscape they inhabit. This is explicitly seen in Vivian’s allusions to disordered eating behaviours in her early adolescence, catalysed by her interest in popular magazines and the supermodel culture of the 1990s.
Darragh’s rotating protagonists create the capacity for readers to see not only themselves but also their mothers, grandmothers, and daughters mirrored in the text, an effect that is achieved not only through her commitment to dense and complex characterisation but also through her signature use of compounding minor details, all of which contribute to the composition of stories that resemble genuine memories. For me, this technique was most effectively executed in the characterisation of Mary Anne, who, despite bearing no biographical resemblance to anyone I have ever known, reminded me considerably of both my mother and my maternal grandmother. Perhaps it was something in her affinity for chocolate or That’s Life magazine; but whatever the case, I could not overlook the radiance in Darragh’s depiction of women inhabiting a fictional yet vibrantly realised Illawarra.
In addition to fostering an impressive emotional connection between reader and text, Thanks For Having Me offers valuable commentary on the nature of familial relationships, often more specifically, those between mothers and daughters. Further, an unexpected but impactful theme that also emerged in the text was the cycle of unintended negative influence parents may have on their children.
When a story is focalised through the perspectives of the women as children, we are exposed to memories that portray the mother-daughter relationship in a manner that highlights subtle and unintentional cruelty. These moments include when Mary Anne burns her hands dropping a cake and is met with scolding instead of sympathy. Similarly, when Vivian buys herself a tube of lipstick that makes her feel confident and pretty, Mary Anne implies she doesn’t like it by telling Vivian she wasted her money. Each character’s childhood perspectives emphasise the distance between herself and her mother.
It is not until years later that both Mary Anne and Vivian experience the impossibility of being a perfect parent, more specifically, the impossibility of flawlessly executing the level of patience and kindness that they wished they had been on the receiving end of in their own youth. Realising this reality, Darragh explores the duality of motherhood, the moments of connection and triumph but also the moments of conflict and disappointment. The impossibility of perfection is beautifully personified through Vivian’s character. From the beginning of the collection, it is evident that Vivian desperately wants to be a good mother to Evie; however, her short temper and violent disposition repeatedly undermine this goal. This dichotomy is first alluded to when Vivian’s desire to welcome Evie into her home leads her to overspend at the supermarket. Directly following, as Vivian tried to leave the shopping centre, her frustration with a persistent ‘chugger’ causes her to lose control and punch him.
Vivian’s history of being quick to anger is further demonstrated in her memory of hitting Evie at the beach after she refused to put on sunscreen. Darragh’s cleverly integrated flashback adds essential context to the strained relationship between mother and daughter. Vivian’s loss of emotional control is later emphasised when it is suggested that Vivian hit Evie harder than she realised, leaving a painful bruise that remains visible days after the incident. Despite this, it remains evident that Vivian loves Evie dearly and tries her best to be a good mother to her. However, Vivian is a victim of the same reality that has impacted the generations of women who preceded her: the impossibility of perfection and the inevitable navigation of the mistakes and misfortunes that arise when attempting to raise a child.
Thanks For Having Me is an intimate and nostalgic rendition of the lives of multiple generations of women in the Illawarra as they navigate both the joys and sorrows of girlhood, womanhood and motherhood. The collection is coloured by its vibrant narrative voice and its skilled execution of multiple perspectives, each revealing the coming-of-age experiences of its three protagonists. The text examines the complex and turbulent nature of familial relationships across eras, navigating the subject with empathy, nuance and a touch of Darragh’s radiant sense of humour. Above all, Thanks for Having Me is a text that made me, and with any luck, will make others, feel seen and understood.
October 26, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Refugia
By Elfie Shiosaki
Magabala Books
ISBN 9781922777133
Reviewed by CHLOE ROBINSON
Having previously reviewed Shiosaki’s writing, I picked up Refugia with high expectations, anticipating powerful language and incredible storytelling. But this went well beyond my expectations, achieving its 5-star status, not even halfway through the opening section. I read through the collection twice without leaving my chair, turning the pages by lamplight many hours after I should’ve been in bed, rendered shellshocked and starstruck, completely entranced and unable to set the book down.
Refugia is the latest poetry collection by Noongar and Yawuru writer, Elfie Shiosaki, whose debut collection Homecoming (2021) was shortlisted for the Stella Prize among numerous other awards. Drawing inspiration from the first year of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s search to understand how the first stars and galaxies were formed, Refugia, takes us on a journey to understand the formation of the Swan River Colony in 1829. Each poem in the collection is presented as a star, in a sky littered with history, begging to be explored. As we journey through the collection, Shiosaki paints a breathtakingly raw portrait of our country’s history, full of nostalgic evocations of earth and space, and unfiltered retellings of the violence inflicted by colonial settlement. Pulling from both the National Library of Australia archives and the UK Parliamentary Archives, Shiosaki seeks to understand the origins of western settlement, exploring the violent formation of what is now known as Western Australia, through the colonizer’s language, as well as her own. The collection paints a breathtakingly raw portrait of our country’s history, the power of the earth and the stars, the years of unjust violence, and the ongoing journey to recovery. The collection revives the heartbeat of the land buried under the bloodied footsteps of Western invasion.
in cosmic cliffs
womb of dust and gas
a story is born
(p.3)
The opening poem, ‘a galaxy of stories’, immediately transports you into the constellations of history kept alive through storytelling. You are greeted by the ‘womb’ of the earth, the birthplace of a universe of stories, and begin your journey through the stars, and toward an understanding of our history.
…hundreds of billions of stars
warping space
stretching light from the early universe
hurtling towards my eyes
(p.3)
Entering the collection feels like stepping into a world beyond time and space, into a sparkling sea of stars and stories. Yet, in turning the page, we are faced with an act of omnipotent and inescapable destruction, the meteor that is John Stirling. We are first introduced to western invasion, through ‘Chicxulub Impact/1829’, the second poem in the collection. Here, the year of Stirling’s invasion (1829), is coupled with an image of extermination: ‘Chicxulub’ the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, and, in a striking echo of the events of 1829, the beauty we have been introduced to in the opening poem, is crushed, buried ‘under the burning debris’ of colonial settlement (p.4). The two events, introduced through the poem’s title, only separated by a forward slash, act as mirrors of the other, Stirling is an architect of extermination, his footsteps on Noongar Nation, an asteroid crushing all life on earth. Our journey toward understanding the formation of Swan River, is immediately characterised as one of mass erasure, the sky of stories we travel through, now blackened with the horrors of colonization.
In this collection, Shiosaki refuses to shy away from the atrocities bloodening the land. Horrific events have occurred and Shiosaki will not let us look away. Placing texts extracted from national archives throughout her collection to depict the unjust cruelty and senseless violence perpetuated by historical figures we are taught to celebrate.
Whereas divers of His Majesty’s subjects have by the license and consent of His
Majesty effected a settlement upon certain
wild and unoccupied lands
(p.19)
These lines, pulled from the Western Australian Act 1829 in the UK Parliamentary archives, sit among the people the act seeks to erase; ‘naming and claiming lands known as intimately to the Whadjuk as the smiling lines around our own grandmothers’ eyes’ (p.20). Shiosaki makes us look beyond the statues donated by ‘CHANNEL NINE AND RADIO 6KY’ (p.11) and the lies written in our history books ‘decisive encounter massacre’ (p.29) toward the truth, recorded in official statements, which shows that Stirling knowingly and savagely massacred a community. In this collection, Shiosaki skilfully manipulates language, reworking texts previously used to validate the violence perpetuated by colonial hands, to dismantle the ingrained cultural perceptions of their fraudulent innocence.
Despite the pain seeping throughout the collection, there remains an unrelenting sense of hope, ‘I refuse / to walk on Country / wounded / limping’ (p.68). Shiosaki refuses to let us ignore what was taken, yet, we do not lose sight of what remains, the stars – and the stories within them – are alive, passed down through the earth and through those who walk upon it. The title poem ‘Refugia’, the only poem in the collection set in the future, is a manifestation of this hope, a reckoning of country, the land enacting its revenge on those who have unjustly intruded upon it. Refugia tells the story of eucalyptus avia, a tree system emerging from the earth to disrupt the foundations of the city above it, displacing the people who have settled upon it and reclaiming the land stolen years ago. White picket fences are turned into rubble and life returns to the land. The earth becomes a character of resistance and regeneration, where hope is not just a possibility, but something alive.
Their root systems cracked open footpaths, roads and foundations of every house and building, bending and breaking them to
the will of a new master.
(p.78)
Refugia is a powerful and emotional exploration of our country’s history, the future that should have been, and the horrific reality of what was. Shiosaki takes us on a journey through the history of our country, simultaneously confronting us, with the truth of western settlement, and its ongoing and inescapable consequences. The violent history that has been paraphrased and minimised in our history books, is placed, raw and untouched, directly across from heartbreaking explorations of the pain and suffering modern Australia was founded upon. Never before in a poetry collection–or in any text for that matter–have I encountered such a wholistic exploration of our land’s history. The collection delves into heartache, grief, love, hope, family, violence, genocide, and everything in between. I finished Refugia in awe, wiped away my tears, and haven’t stopped recommending it to anyone who will listen. A masterpiece of language, and a powerful exploration of our country’s history, Refugia is a work of art that belongs permanently in the Australian curriculum and on all Australian bookshelves.
CHLOE ROBINSON (she/her) is a writer and avid reader born and raised in Bunurong and Wadawurrung Country. She is currently undertaking her Masters in Writing and Publishing at RMIT University after completing her Bachelors in English Literature at the University of Melbourne.
Empathy
