Tamara Lazaroff reviews No Country Woman by Zoya Patel

November 16, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

No Country Woman: A Memoir of Not Belonging

By Zoya Patel

Hachette

ISBN: 978 0 7336 4006 3

Reviewed by TAMARA LAZAROFF
 
 
Zoya Patel’s No Country Woman: A Memoir of Not Belonging is a collection of twelve memoir essays that explore the experience of growing up as a migrant and person of colour in Australia – in particular, negotiating the tangle of hyphens which Patel inhabits as a female Indian-Fijian-Australian. In the work, then, Patel examines identity, race and gender, from a personal standpoint. For example:

‘If anything, I have spent my life trying not to feel Fijian-Indian, desperate to prove that my cultural identity is as ‘Australian’ as that of my white friends who grew up in the same white suburbs as me, attending the same schools…’ (41).

However, she always has one eye on the broader social forces at work that have shaped her experiences and desires. Patel describes how during her childhood in the ‘90s, when Pauline Hanson’s insistent message that immigrants should ‘go back to where they came from’ was rampant across the news, she feared that the authorities would come to take her and her family away from their new Australian home (47). Similarly, Patel also reminds us that it wasn’t until 2011 that Neighbours featured its first non-white family, the Kapoors, on Ramsay Street after almost thirty years running; and that the decision was met with such opposition from Australian fans that it attracted international media attention (59). Soon after, the Kapoors were sent back ‘to where they came from’ – to India – to visit a sick relative and never returned.

In No Country Woman, there are numerous physical journeys recounted – back, to, away from, around, through – though there are never any convenient disappearances from the screen, map or storyline. Rather, the experiences of movement are thoroughly picked apart.

There is the story of Patel’s family’s migration from Fiji to the NSW town of Albury where Patel and her three siblings are teased, to put it mildly, for having skin ‘…brown like poo’ (93). There is a family ‘roots tour’ holiday to Patel’s paternal great-grandmother’s village in Gujarat where eleven-year-old Patel is first confronted with ‘meeting people not that different to me living in much worse circumstances’ (147), and the learning that this distress has a name: migrant guilt. There are also interstate day-trips to purchase salwar kameez in the Indian streets of Western Sydney’s Liverpool that elicit a different kind of shame, and encapsulate the ‘unspoken conflict between the two halves of my self’ (52); teenaged Patel trails behind her chirping mother and sisters unable to fully participate in their merriment.

Patel chooses, however, to begin the collection, in the title essay ‘No-country woman’, by detailing her first trip back to Fiji after many years absence as a twenty-eight-year-old adult. Uncomfortably, she travels with a tourist party and her white male partner, in order to attend a wedding at a ‘paradise island’ resort. The only non-white person, other than the kaiviti staff dressed in grass skirts, she feels as much a sense of injustice as she did in India. Afterwards, when she and her white partner – a union considered scandalous in South Asian cultures (12) – spend some time in Nadi, Fiji’s capital, Patel is challenged about her Fijian-Indianness by a local she meets on the street. She comes to realise that she doesn’t belong there in Fiji, either – and here lies the premise of the book. Patel is a no-country woman, always asking herself the question (and fielding the same from others): Where do I really come from? Where is my place? How and where do I fit?

In the essay ‘Money Can’t Buy Harmony’, another particularly poignant physical journey – a tragicomedy, in fact – Patel is shown exactly. A Canberran teenaged schoolgirl, she is invited to participate in a well-intentioned but not particularly well-thought-out government-funded bus tour with other teenaged people of colour. Across rural NSW they travel performing traditional dances and/or showcasing their other talents – Patel gives a speech – for umpteen school assemblies. Their purpose: to spread the message of cultural harmony and eradicate racism at its root – in the country’s youth, apparently. But, what the organisers did not consider, Patel writes, is that the reasons for some rural communities’ us-and-them attitudes may not have been simply due to misinformation or ignorance, but lack of opportunity in tight economies, ‘poverty, isolation… and [lack of] representations of diversity in the media’ (74). No amount of singing, dancing or orating was going to change that. Patel remembers vividly, during one of the Harmony Ambassadors’ performances, there was a single Vietnamese-Australian boy, in a sea of bored faces, ‘…who visibly shrank down in his seat, as if he wanted to make clear that he wasn’t associated with this ragtag mob of weirdos who all happened to be not “Aussie” (72).’

Another ‘journey’, or trajectory, examined in No Country Woman, and perhaps one of the most important, is Patel’s engagement with feminism – as a migrant and person of colour. Many readers will know that Patel is the also the founding editor of the online feminist literature and arts journal, Feminartsy, and was previously the editor of Lip Magazine, another Australia-based feminist publication – these passages are detailed in the book. Patel’s dedication to and exploration of feminism has been lengthy. But for a teenaged Patel growing frustrated with the gender norms within the Fijian-Indian community – ‘the parts…that made me feel that perhaps women weren’t valued as highly… as in my immediate family’ (82) – there didn’t seem to be much in the way of easily accessible literature to help her navigate the terrain in a way that fit with her day-to-day realities. Most of it was ‘…targeted at middle-class white women’ (214). The concept of raunch feminism, for example, felt alienating; Patel writes: ‘…I was still trying to determine whether my body was mine to dress in jeans and a normal t-shirt that didn’t entirely cover my bum’ (215).

On the flip-side, Patel reasons that for the Fijian-Indian community in Australia, like many migrant communities, the wellbeing of the group is ‘…considered more important than individual freedom’ (105) – and is a valuable position, too. Patel is at pains to add that she doesn’t want people to think talking about issues of gender inequality in Indian culture means that she favours Australian culture or sees it as progressive or culturally superior (209) – ‘Women in the West are certainly less visibly confined by gender norms, but the patriarchy is insidious, and it’s usually what you can’t see that you should be paying attention to’ (208). Rather, in No Woman Country, Patel wants to open up and make space for healthy discussion about intersectionality, the valid variances in the lived experiences of all women and feminists.

Certainly, conversation with friends – ‘almost exclusively with women…’ (116) – and years of mulling over cultural identity issues together have been imperative to the writing of and thinking through the ideas in No Country Woman (261). In perhaps one of the most moving essays in the book, ‘Kindred Spirits’, Patel traces one particularly influential female friendship from the first year of high school to the present day. Patel writes that she and Melissa, who happens to be white, ‘graduated from one obsession to another’ (97) – from ‘… horses and Harry Potter… to zines, writing… indie rock music, manga… vegetarianism, animal welfare, backpacking through Europe and, most recently, dog memes’ (97). In the spirit of mutual generosity and support, as young women they dared to dream about their future selves and careers. In fact, in year nine they both completed a week of work experience at Lip; the year was 2004 and it was a time when there was ‘…nothing more lame than feminism (100).’ Still, Patel writes that Melissa was ‘the person who, in some ways, introduced me to myself’ (97), and to an identity that saw past ‘notions of race, or gender, or purpose (116).’ Patel goes on: ‘Together, we bridged a divide that had been constructed from centuries of racial prejudice that assumed our skin colour made us so fundamentally different that our friendship would taint both of us (116)’.

No Country Woman reads as though a friend is sharing some of the most important and intimate things about her life. Thoughtful, well-researched, straightforward and often funny, the book sits closely in ‘friendship’ to other contemporary books such as Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race, Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem and Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not The Mood. The collection will appeal to a wide audience, including first, second and even third generation migrants, as well as those interested in the subjects of race, identity and intersectional feminism in contemporary Australian culture.
 
 
 
TAMARA LAZAROFF is a Brisbane-based writer of short fiction and creative nonfiction. She has a particular interest in hidden histories, the migrant experience, feminist and queer themes, oral storytelling traditions and celebratory stories of social interconnectedness.

Light Borrowers: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2018 reviewed by Beejay Silcox

November 7, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Light Borrowers: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2018

Foreword by Isabelle Li

Brio Books

ISBN: 9781925589627

Review by BEEJAY SILCOX

“In the beginning, it was just us and the words,” writes University of Technology Sydney (UTS) student –and writer – EM Tasker. “We sang them into being, and they existed only in our minds. They reproduced by passing from the lips of one person to the ears of another. But that meant they could only reproduce when people gathered. That was until Writing joined the relationship. The resulting ménage à trois was wildly successful.” (171)

For 32 years, UTS has been celebrating the fruits of that lexical love triangle by publishing an anthology of work penned by its Creative Writing students. This year’s lovingly-assembled edition, Light Borrowers, borrows its title from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Rival’, and with it the tension ever-present in Plath’s poetry – the glorious tension between beauty and annihilation.

As a reader, opening an anthology is akin to entering a room of strangers; we arrive hopeful but nervous, ears pricked for conversation, camaraderie and conflict. How (and how well) we are welcomed is largely dependent on our hosts, on how well we are introduced to the crowd. In Light Borrowers, UTS alumna, author and translator Isabelle Li greets us warmly at the door with the key to a live and lively room. There is one line, she argues in her foreword, that will unlock the anthology; it is waiting for us near its midpoint, in a poem by Shoshana Gottlieb: “The In Between / pockets of time that happen as we wait for / the moments we beg to define us.” (163)

Light Borrowers is anchored in this ‘In Between’. Across a range of genres, from memoir to flash (one of its most memorable contributions by Qing Ming Je is a single, knife-edged sentence), each of its 28 pieces inhabit the liminal spaces that separate, connect and define us. Between childhood and adulthood; believing and knowing; memory and forgetting; remembered pasts and imagined futures; fable and fact. Between, as Gottlieb describes, “the Things We Do and the Things That Happen To Us.” (164)

In Sydney Khoo’s ‘I’m (Not) Lovin’ It’ we slip between the sheets, as they wrestle with sexual labels and expectations that simply do not fit: “Wearing those labels felt like sleeping in a bed that wasn’t mine,” they write. “As comfortable as the mattress was, and as clean as the sheets were, I woke up irritable, unrested.”(38) Khoo’s piece is a confident love story – a self-love story – which begins when they ingeniously convince their conservative mother to buy them a sex toy.

In Sally Breen’s ‘The Garden’ we slip between the senses to let “vivid colours draw vivid memories.” In it, a woman remembers versions of her grandfather’s garden and the versions of herself that wandered it. It’s a piece heady with synesthetic nostalgia, brilliantly coloured in “Kodachrome hues”:

“And all that remains is this orchard. Heirloom apples, small and crisp. I twist an apple, a revolution. And when it snaps the branch flicks back. Fruit fits snugly in my hand. It is this orchard that my grandmother adored. Blue Mountains. These blue days of sadness.” (28)

And in Amy Shapiro’s ‘Scheherazade’ we slip between forms as she takes the cage of a theatre script and shakes the bars to produce something else entirely – a dark vision of a mechanised future that explores that unfathomable space between consciousness and algorithm. “Suffering isn’t regression,” (55) Shapiro’s human protagonist tells her android interrogator. How might he believe her?

But it is the space between worlds – the space between cultures, traditions, histories and geographies – that beckons most insistently in Light Borrowers. “My people are the invisible fatalities / The footnotes of / Your people’s / History,” (209) laments Christine Afoa, of her Samoan heritage in ‘My People’ – a poem fearless, furious and proud.

“There is no X to mark my spot on this land,” writes Kiwi Shana Chandra, as she grapples with how conspicuously inconspicuous she feels visiting India:

“I know that if I enter this crowd, its surge will envelop me and I will be undetectable. I remember how scared I was at this thought when I first got off the plane in India, annoyed at all the brown faces, identical to mine. I am so comfortable wearing my difference in New Zealand and Australia that here I feel different, although I look the same as everyone else.” (190)

Worlds erased and escaped, lost and left, conjured and confining – Light Borrowers is anchored in the sensory details that bring worlds to life: the slow, night-time clacking of a basket of live snails; a lipstick kiss on a pillowslip; a sweaty city of “sleep deprived malcontents wearing badly fitting underpants”; a witty graffiti retort. “They zoom past the train line,” writes Jack Cameron Stanton, “and he sees the famous scrawl: GOD HATES HOMMOS, in black spray paint, with a neater, more curvaceous response spread beneath it in purple: BUT DOES HE LIKE TABOULI?” (83)

Those worlds are as individual as their authors; “inconsolably human” to borrow a phrase from Stanton. The triumph of Light Borrowers is that it has been constructed in, by and for, a diverse Australia, and it shows. This is an anthology that cares about the differences within Asian-Australian communities, not just between them. As Khoo writes: “Growing up as a second-generation Chinese Australian, I was constantly learning that the norm was actually just my norm.” (35) We are all living in our own, individual between place, Light Borrowers argues. Between the people we are, and the people we wish to be. Between ourselves and the world.

And yes, Light Borrowers is student work – the product of exuberance, ambition, earnestness and generosity. Every piece carrying the coiled energy of a seed, the shape of the author to come.

When people write of writing talent, there’s a tendency to equate youth with promise. We make list after list of bright young things to watch, and use ‘young’ as a synonym for ‘new’. Light Borrowers offers a magnificent rejoinder in the work of Echo Qin He, a woman determined to escape her inheritance of silence:

“I am in my 50s now. I don’t want to regret on my deathbed that I never gave it a go. It has taken me a long time. I have begun writing and my muscles are getting stronger day by day. Elements that used to be hard previously, that I didn’t know how to write about, now come more easily.” (160)

As a new migrant to Australia, writing – even reading – fiction felt like a luxury Echo Qin He could not afford, “making a living had to come first”. We can’t afford to lose or alienate voices like hers; new, urgent and carrying a lifetime – generations – of untold stories. We need more spaces like the UTS anthology, spaces that make room for new writers as they navigate that vital exploratory, playful space between searching for, and finding, their voice. A place where they can borrow a little light.

BEEJAY SILCOX came to writing circuitously; after narrowly escaping a life in the law, she has worked as a criminologist, agony-aunt, strategic policy boffin, and teacher of Americans. It is better for everyone that she now works on her own, as a literary critic and cultural commentator. Her award-winning short fiction has been published internationally, and recently anthologized in Best Australian Stories and Meanjin A-Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now. Incurably peripatetic, Beejay is currently based in Cairo, where she writes from a century-old building in the middle of an island, in the middle of the Nile.

Vagabond deciBels3 Launch Speech by Emily Stewart

September 4, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

deciBels3 

Vagabond 2018

Edited by Michelle Cahill & Dimitra Harvey

Launched by EMILY STEWART

How to mobilise the launch speech? An essay in the form of a thread

I have been metabolising Michelle Cahill’s work on interceptionality, a term she has been dissecting and championing over three essays with the Sydney Review of Books, the latest published this week. I am deeply interested in her rich theorisation, which is seen in practice with the activism of Mascara Literary Review, interception being a pragmatic, principled approach that can, in Michelle’s words, ‘unmask entitlement and inaugurate dialogue’ but which also, and this is really important – offer creative protection. Creative protection, because the intercepts that Michelle enacts are highly generative actions. Her activism – each tweet, email, newsletter – that calls for better representation and equitable opportunities for CALD writers opens up new sites of potential. I’ve been thinking through what the use of a launch speech might be within an interceptional framework – and indeed where it even fits within the publishing ecology, as it’s not a review, or criticism, but is significant nonetheless, creating a shape and a language for how books will be talked about by others. The launch speech is a powerful object as it oftentimes sets the tone for the critical discourse that will follow. So how to mobilise it?

Introducing deciBels 3 chapbook series, edited by Michelle Cahill and Dimitra Harvey

The format I have chosen acknowledges the extraordinary event that is the deciBels 3 chapbook series: the release of ten books all at once is a powerful statement that actively works against received publishing logics; where books are published individually and given their own run before the next appears. This collectivist, connective model has impact – it is an opportunity for CALD writers to hold more space together than they would individually. But I have also been sensitive to making sure that each book gets its due.

Furious summations: Eleanor Jackson’s  A Leaving

‘The amniotic place / of rejection from which we are born’. Jackson is drawn to moral complexity found here in infidelity, at a conference, on death row. These are poems as furious summations. In ‘Remembrance Day’, she writes, ‘Don’t let me wallow in generalities’ ­– the imperative drives these poems. Can’t let emotion distract from incisiveness, poetry needs both. There is great range in this small book, which is deeply invested in the world ­­– the poet listens closely and the poems enact that listening, moving between a restrained political persona and a tender, more buoyant self.

Peace inside the unresolvable: Dimitra Harvey’s ­A Fistful of Hail

Cross-pollinations: A line of Eleanor Jackson’s, ‘the caesura between the outage and the back-up’ precisely describes the work of Dimitra Harvey’s poems, their electric holding of space within/around/after moments of brutality – can a poem act as a coda to violence? Or is violence inherently without coda? How to find peace inside the unresolvable­ ­– see the poems ‘Father’, ‘Acrocorinth’, ‘Sport’. Contradictory as it may seem, through the sonic the poems resist the structural confines that also give the poems their admirable pressure – they resonate. From ‘Station’: ‘A woman’s laugh, the clink of glasses – the city’s noises are padded here. Then a whip of wire, a spring-loaded lash. The train pulls up, groaning in its metal’.

She is so free: Angela Serrano’s Else But a Madness Most Discreet

The libidinous haze of Angela Serrano’s sex-positive poems strikes immediately; their temperature – hot – because they fully embrace the abject. Case in point: the book’s first poem begins with its speaker taking a shit. Later in the book: ‘At first I thought the fog was from a fire’. But the reader knows by then that Serrano’s fog is a pleasure-full fugue. And something else – ‘intersections are Freudian hotspots’. The poems at the centre of the book are presented in Tagalog first, then English. The poetic persona’s largesse, appetite, ambition. Her fluidity, open pursuit of desire – she is so free.

Details of light: Anna Jacobson’s The Last Postman

Speculative, epistolary, characterful. Sensorial – keyed into atmospheres. Details of light. ‘The sun as it performs its yoga’. More volatile: ‘I was walking in the same direction as you – watched you crush a lit cigarette into your pocket’. A spectral parsing in ‘Letter 7’, the opening line ‘water damaged eyes are made whole again’. The poem makes uncanny the relation of body and material. (But then, perhaps this is always? Uncanny.) ‘Your job is to erase these paper bruises’. At first a poem about the reconstructive efforts of memory, but at a certain point it’s occulted. ‘You pick up the stylus, graft pixels to creases’.

I turned the word over and over: Ramon Loyola’s The Measure of Skin

Measure – restraint? Measure – wager? I turned the word over and over as I read these love poems. These poems about touch, and skin. Also, consistently, about the transgressive power of looking. (That overblown phrasing is mine alone. Loyola is considered – measured. This measure, its considered restraint, holds erotic charge (so there is something at stake – a wager). One of these poems is among the best sex poems I’ve ever read. Every one of these poems is a blueprint for cultivating deep courage in the pursuit of self-knowledge: ‘I’m afraid to look but I must, I must, without hesitation’.

The book with flames on its cover: Sumudu Samarawickrama’s Utter the Thing

These poems often take place at dusk, the casting of ambiguous time, where there is still – just – enough light for colour. In the poem ‘Smoothas’ this state is described as ‘lavender gloaming’, and it imbues the poems with a heightened sense of drama where all senses are labile, on alert.

Kinetics in the poem ‘power/move’, that slash is some/one and they are changing their position.

Kinetics in the poem ‘The Lug’, where a door opens and time jump cuts and words run-in-to-each-other-so ‘Ipretend’, ‘myvoice’, ‘feigningconsistency’. The speaker is not safe.

Kinetics in the poem ‘Anger Poem’: ‘I’m writing this story over this story I wrote The same story.’ The great repetitions of being in experience.

Trajectories: Jessie Tu’s You Should Have Told Me We Have Nothing Left

Intimate examinations of women’s lives and their various trajectories. How do we become who we are, or perhaps more importantly, what happens to us? The poem ‘And it is what it is’: ‘You are given fingers before a mouth’. The poem ‘The Hotel’, its speaker taking and loading, taking and loading her luggage, she is ‘always arriving’. The everyday questions that comprise life’s form: when to fight for a relationship, whether to have a kid.

But then with the poem Going there where there is no place to go, Tu dissolves the very notion of trajectory, she tips the poem on its side.

Read in the usual way, English-language lines travel forward. At this new angle they pull backwards. Our past grows with us – fact. How to keep moving?

She writes, ‘The only possible answer to this problem with no solution is to keep turning up’.

Twice-ness: Ariel Riveros’s Commoning

From the opening poem ‘Bel Canto’: ‘Your image comes up and I’m speaking to your photo as well as to you’. Riveros’s poems always speak twice, but FYI I’m using ‘twice’ as a placeholder for ‘multiply’. The twice-ness of these poems causes little rips in time, so that ‘a medieval of plastics reach the waterways’ and ‘order of truth is no flicked lumiere’. In the poem ‘Paen to a 1996 nervous breakdown’, ‘some maps are lost in themselves / and territories that we’ve not onedered but twodered and now we’ve threedered and can fourded’. Multiplicity can quickly become terrifying – it does so for me in the portentous ‘A Poet Knows When’, which opens with the lines ‘Right up against me/ before sleep/ after waking/ I carry carcass’. That carcass is multiple, carried by and speaking to the poet, but appearing in a second form as well, as ‘carcass earth’. Anything can, and has, and does and will happen – but the shadow to this, the question of accountability, is ever-present. The Melbourne poem ‘Settlement’ in particular troubles notions of political ‘progress’ (even and especially as it doubles, triples): ‘The bum is the seat of Parliament as we get to the following station’.

Notes from a homing pigeon: Misbah’s Rooftops In Karachi

Misbah’s clipped, urgent missives report on Karachi, Pakistan, the city of her birth; and on her subsequent travels there, real and imagined. In their small, tight prose forms, they can be read like notes from a homing pigeon – and indeed one such pigeon appears in the very first line of the book. Each missive or note is highly architectural in its construction; a memory palace. From the poem ‘Territory’: ‘Under my skin is a mosque buried, over its surface borders are patrolled, in the lines of my hands are partitions of space occupied by warring microbes building temples of salt’. This precision also recalls tactics of surveillance; a thorough updating of the homing pigeon metaphor – so while the poems sometimes speak to place, at other times they register site. Often, and as in the poem ‘Last Transcript from Osama’, presented here in full, there is an interleaving: ‘X marks the coordinates of clouds disconnected, the colour of bandages, the colour of sleep, uniforms, and especially ambulances and weddings, kites on wires, the soft calligraphy of fighter pilots, and rooftops that are in every way the surface of the moon’.

A loop, hoop, circle: Anupama Pilbrow’s Body Poems

Pilbrow’s interest in exchange, reciprocity, relationality is signalled in the book’s dedication before readers even get to the poems. I hope she won’t mind me sharing it: ‘To my family. I love them and they love me’. A Pilbrow poem rolls forward as a loop, hoop, circle. Almost every poem is its own category of poem (as in they are called ‘Body Poem’,’Membrane Poem’, ‘Despicable Body Poem’, ‘Trying to Remember My Birth Poem’, &c. While wellness culture promotes the present as a desired state of calm, in Pilbrow’s Poem-poems, the present is absurd, fantastic, gross. From ‘Ocean Poem’: ‘I have a bath and I shave my legs underwater so all the hair pieces are swimming in the bath water with me’. Her forensic descriptions are also-always ebullient – how? ‘Hold the bone and scrape it hard against concrete or volcanic rock to shear away soft and round bits until the bone is a weapon’. A cool new mantra.

I wish each of these brilliant writers every possible success

Congratulations to editors Michelle Cahill and Dimitra Harvey, with the support of Michael Brennan and Vagabond Press, for their fearless and clear-sighted editorial vision, for bringing ten impassioned, uncompromising and beautifully moving books into the world all at once.

EMILY STEWART is poetry editor at Giramondo Publishing and a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University where she is conducting research at the intersection of poetry and architecture. Her first collection Knocks was published by Vagabond Press in 2016 and received the Noel Rowe Prize.

From cultures of violence to ways of peace by Anne Elvey

August 6, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

From cultures of violence to ways of peace: reading the Benedictus in the context of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers in offshore detention

Revised version of a paper given at ‘Things That Make for Peace: Peace and Sacred Texts Conference’, hosted by School of Theology & Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation, Charles Sturt University, at United Theological College, North Parramatta, 7–9 March 2018.

The author acknowledges the traditional owners of the Parramatta area: the Burramattagal people of the Darug nation, and pays her respects to the elders past, present and emerging, recognising their continuing connection with and custodianship of this place, especially the river.

***

On 31 October 2017, the Regional Processing Centre housing asylum seekers in detention on Manus Island—many of whom had been confirmed as refugees—was closed. For months beforehand, the men detained, as well as refugee advocates and agencies, had warned that the Australian and Papua New Guinean Governments had not properly prepared for this closure. Around 600 men were to be moved to facilities in Lorengau, Hillside Haus and West Lorengau; supporters and human rights observers reported that these facilities were unready. Moreover, before the date for transfer, essential services of food, water, medical care, power and security were phased out and finally withdrawn. The men who had already been protesting their detention and impending forced transfer to sites they believed, with reason, to be unready and unsafe, refused to be moved. They staged a nonviolent resistance for 22 days from 31 October to 22 November 2017 when they were forcibly removed and transported to the new facilities.

Of the months leading up to the closure of the Regional Processing Centre, Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist and writer from Ilam in Iran, who had already been held on Manus Island for over four years, wrote: ‘For many months, the refugees living inside Manus prison have had to endure extraordinarily oppressive conditions orchestrated by the Australian government’ (‘Letter’). Though not the only public voice among the detainees, Boochani—especially through his articles in The Guardian and The Saturday Paper, and his daily Twitter and Facebook posts—became a key communicator of the men’s situation to Australians, calling both people and government to account for the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees on Manus and Nauru. The nonviolent action of the men, and the response to it by Papua New Guinea officials in collaboration with the Australian Federal Government, became a test case for the ongoing Australian policy of offshore detention. For many Australians, it is clear that offshore detention is neither sustainable nor desirable, and needs urgent change that is tragically not forthcoming. Many, however, remain indifferent.

Serially, since the time of the Howard Government’s response to the sinking of the Siev X in 2001, Australian Governments—both Coalition and Labor—have enacted policies of border protection where deterrence of people arriving by boat, using so called ‘people smugglers’, are based on cruelty to detainees, though arguably such cruelty has escalated under the current Coalition Government.

In this essay I focus on Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers in detention, particularly in those three weeks from 31 October 2017. The issue is not resolved, as recent reports of inadequate medical care—particularly in mental health—for detainees on Nauru and in the new facilities on Manus indicate (e.g. Davidson 2018a; Syed 2018). Since the forced transfer of the men, however, the Australian media has largely lost interest and even public Australian activism has died down, though there were rallies on Palm Sunday (25 March 2018) for refugees; on 1 March 2018 Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Melbourne launched a campaign to #changethepolicy; and between 16 and 22 July 2018 #FiveYearsTooMany rallies were held around Australia.

Writing of ‘Undocumented Immigrants, Asylum Seekers, and Human Rights’, Mark Brett (2016, 163–64) comments, ‘The raw numbers of people seeking asylum in Australia, especially when considered in relation to national wealth, barely rate a mention in international analyses, yet national elections in Australia have been known to turn on “border protection” policies. / What, then, can biblical theology and ethics hope to contribute to the debates?’ In conversation with Habermas, Brett (2016, 35) sees a role for biblical theology in public discourse not in service of a ‘unified public culture, but rather, by a thickening of dialogue between religious and non-religious traditions’, so that ‘theological ethics towards the marginalised … inform’ political praxis. In this essay, I bring into conversation Boochani’s ‘A Letter from Manus Island’ and the Benedictus, a biblical hymn, understood as songs of protest. My aim is to suggest what might be elements of a cultural shift from violence to nonviolence, and what this shift should mean in relation to public response to offshore detention of asylum seekers.

Protest writing

Warren Carter (2011) identifies four key and ‘interweaving dynamics’ of African American and South African performative songs of protest from the US slave, civil rights, and South African apartheid eras. They are:

‘naming contexts of oppressive suffering’
‘bestowing dignity’
‘fostering hope for change’
‘securing communal solidarity’.

Carter applies these dynamics to an analysis of the songs of the Lukan infancy narratives (especially, The Magnificat and The Benedictus) and reads these as songs of protest in the context of oppressive Roman occupation and empire.

Briefly, Carter argues that in a theo-political frame the songs encode the perspective of the marginalised and name aspects of Roman empire as a context of oppressive suffering: in the Lukan songs the imperial social system of domination, resulting in economic oppression, operates contrary to divine purposes and results in the people’s need for divine assistance. The songs bestow dignity by construing the people and the divine as interrelated, as kin, with the divine present to the people. Carter (2011) writes:

The songs function to bestow dignity in the midst of dehumanizing oppression by naming the relationship with God, celebrating the favorable divine disposition experienced in their midst, recalling benign and faithful covenant commitments, awaiting vengeance, and echoing songs of previous interventions.

Interrelated is the way the songs offer an alternative vision of reality and so provide hope through appropriating and transforming key facets of Roman society; in the context of the Gospel of Luke, they offer a vision of release from debt and a peace different from the Pax Romana which functions as a tool of domination reinforcing the status quo. Finally, for Carter (2011), the songs suggest a communal understanding spanning past, present and future, and defining ‘community as one that benefits from’ divine intervention. Communal solidarity is secured by divine promise, and resists or unsettles the existing societal order with an alternative social vision.

Nonetheless, as Carter (2011) notes ‘the songs do not only resist, they also imitate and perpetuate the imperial structures that they oppose’. To some extent, this mimicry is inevitable, but the re-inscription of empire is a significant factor in the ways violence and nonviolence appear in the song of Zechariah (the Benedictus). Before I turn more closely to this song, I examine a description of nonviolent action in the face of violence, in Boochani’s ‘A Letter from Manus Island’.

Behrouz Boochani’s ‘A Letter from Manus Island’ and other writing

Boochani’s ‘Letter’ exhibits the four features of protest writing that Carter nominates. It begins with a description of a situation of oppressive suffering experienced by the detainees on Manus Island, naming the Regional Processing Centre and the new facilities as prison camps and the treatment of the 600 refugees who refused to move on 31 October 2017 as a regime of ‘extreme force and dictatorship’ (‘Letter’). Reports from Boochani, other detainees, visitors such as Tim Costello, Jarrod McKenna, and UN and other human rights observers during the 22 days of nonviolent protest tell of no provision of food, water or medical care, failed security, destruction of property by local officials, and piercing of makeshift water tanks, among other things.

Boochani writes of the way the men responded by claiming their dignity as human beings. This was vital to their action. He says: ‘The refugees were able to reimagine themselves in the face of the detention regime’ (‘Letter’). They resisted their characterisation as the ‘passive refugee’ that the Australian government had constructed as exploitable for their own political ends, and asserted ‘that we are human beings’ (‘Letter’). Central to this assertion was the men’s claiming of their freedom. This was not simply freedom as a future hope—that is, freedom from detention, though of course this was fundamental. They also asserted a deeper, hard-won—and in the circumstances difficult to sustain—freedom while in detention: to act as human beings with authority and choice. Boochani (2017c) describes this assertion of freedom as the key motivating factor for their action, in contrast to the practical reasons adduced by supporters—for example, the inadequacy of the new detention facilities. At one level this was a freedom that cried ‘enough is enough’, ‘we will not be moved from one prison camp to another prison camp’ (Boochani 2017c). At another level, this drawing the line was a claiming of their shared humanity.

Freedom gave hope in their shared situation. Boochani writes: ‘We learnt that humans have no sanctuary except within other human beings’ (‘Letter’). Given the intransigence of the current Australian government concerning offshore detention, evidenced in the tone of what one friend in Melbourne describes as the ‘robot letters’ from Peter Dutton MP’s office, it is hard to see how hope is possible. But both in his ‘Letter’ and elsewhere, Boochani (2017e), describers the way the land of Manus and its surrounding sea were sites of hope, as:

the violence designed in government spaces and targeted against us has driven our lives towards nature … since we hope that maybe we could make its meaning, beauty and affection part of our reality. And coming to this realisation is the most pristine, compassionate and non-violent relationship and encounter possible for the imprisoned refugees in terms of rebuilding our lives and identities. (‘Letter’)

The choice the men took, while sustained by the surrounding beauty of the natural world when there was little else to sustain them, also secured a sense of communal solidarity. Boochani’s ‘Letter’ describes this solidarity in terms of democracy, respect for the freedom of each, care for the sick, sharing of food, co-operation concerning provision of vital needs, and cross-species kindness. What his description, his protest writing, adds to Carter’s analysis of African American and South African performances of protest, moreover, is this: an articulation of a political poetics. ‘Our resistance’, Boochani writes, ‘enacted a profound poetic performance’; ‘it was an epic of love’, he says (‘Letter’). Moreover, for Boochani, this resistance is a challenge to Australians’ self-perception, a haunting which I suggest echoes the haunting of Australia’s colonial past and present in relation to Indigenous peoples: ‘[Australians] would come to realise something about how they imagined themselves to be until now. … regarding their illusions of moral superiority’ (‘Letter’). He writes, ‘Our resistance is a new manifesto for humanity and love.’

While some of the men who took part in the nonviolent resistance have begun to be resettled in the US, many remain in detention in the new facilities on Manus, and stories regularly emerge of those with illnesses, especially mental illnesses, not receiving adequate treatment. In May 2018, after an earlier version of this essay was presented in North Parramatta, another refugee detained for years died tragically on Manus Island. Boochani commented at the time about the failures to treat this man’s illness over several years (Davidson 2018b).

Boochani was born in 1983, only six years before the older of my two sons, and many of the men on Manus are young men, some of whom were teenagers when they were taken into detention. We fail to imagine our adult children in this situation; we fail to be haunted by this imagining.

Reading the Benedictus

The Benedictus is a powerful song. Reading this text in conversation with Boochani’s ‘A Letter from Manus’, however, I am tempted to feel that the biblical song will come off second best. In the light of Boochani’s piece—which does not reinscribe violence in its language as far as I can see—I want to ask about the flow of the language in the Benedictus and the kind of culture it envisages, keeping in mind the ways Boochani’s letter unsettles Australian cultural imaginaries of moral superiority.

The New Revised Standard Version English translation of the Benedictus reads:

v68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
v69 He has raised up a mighty savior for us
in the house of his servant David,
v70 as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
v71 that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.
v72 Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,
and has remembered his holy covenant,
v73 the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,
to grant us
v74 that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,
might serve him without fear,
v75 in holiness and righteousness
before him all our days.
v76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
v77 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
v78 By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
v79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:68–79 nrsv)

The kyriarchal language (the language of lordship) of the song is unavoidable in the opening ‘Blessed be’ kurios ho theos tou (the Lord God of) Israel (v68) (Schüssler Fiorenza 1992). Immediately the performing-listening community is situated in relation to the divine as a people in relation to their lord or overlord, even master. However benignly intended, the language of empire insinuates itself into the relationship between a people and their god, who has visited (episkepsato) them enacting a redemption (which is also loosening of their bonds lutrosin, salvation soteriav, release aphesis). Visitation can refer to judgement of, as well as care for, the people, and in the wider Gospel of Luke is marked by hospitality, aphesis (release from debts and forgiveness), and compassion (Elvey 2009; Byrne 2000). In the Benedictus, too, mercy/compassion (vv72, 78) will become part of the scope of this visitation which has happened in the past and continues into the future. But the imperial imprint in the description of divine/human relation is evident in the ascription of the ancestor David as paidos (slave/servant/child, v69)—the familial androcentric kinship imagery of father-son crosses with the imagery of master-slave (as in the Magnificat where Mary refers to herself as doule, slave, v48). Salvation is imaged by a horn (keras) (v69) recalling military language for the flank or wing of an army (as well as the thrusting or defending horn of an animal; see for example Marshall 1978), though the English translation I have cited above smooths over this.

Community solidarity reaches into the past with the appeal to the word of the prophets (v70), and into the future with the promise of the prophecy of the little child (presumably John the Baptist) (v76) joined in the present prophetic word of his father Zechariah (vv68–79). These words are part of a series of gusts of prophecy: the words of Elizabeth and Mary (1:42–45; 47–55), those of Simeon (2:29–32; 34–35) and the unrecorded words of the prophet Anna (2:36). Salvation (v69) in this communal context is liberation from enemies, those who hate (vv71, 74).

Talk of enemies in verses 71 and 74 sandwiches the divine enactment of mercy toward the ancestors of the people as constituted in the memory of the covenant (v72). The seriousness of the covenant is signalled by the recollection of a divine oath (orkon) to Abraham (v73). The people are given release from fear and a capacity to worship in freedom (v75). To what extent this suggests an imperial context where worship is not experienced as free from fear is unclear, but the implication seems to be that deliverance from enemies involves a kind of religious freedom (Pickett 2011). This is the first major shift in the song. Military language and talk of enemies gives way to a different vision described by piety/holiness/wholeness and righteousness/justice, the two signalling right relation with the divine and with other humans.

A second shift follows with the turn to the newly-born child. Repeating the earlier designation of David as paidos, the child stands in for the people. Echoing Isaiah 40, the child prepares the ways (hodous) of the divine or his messiah (v76), who confers knowledge of salvation. The song no longer refers to enemies but to aphesis (release/freedom, v77). Elsewhere in Luke (esp. 4:18), aphesis signals a kind of forgiveness that is not only metaphorical release from debts and debt-slavery, but also more broadly release from oppression (Elvey 2009), potentially the kind of freedom which Boochani (2017a, c) describes: a freedom that encompasses but is more than freedom from detention, being also the possibility of freedom in detention that is actualised not in acquiescence to the oppressive regime but in nonviolent resistance to it.

In the Benedictus, there is a pronouncement of freedom. In relation to the promised freedom, the divine experiences and performs mercy—from the entrails/guts (splanchna) (the seat of emotion) (v78). The description dia splanchna eleous (the tender mercies) of the divine echoes in the three uses of the verb splanchnizomai later in Luke’s gospel to describe a kind of compassionate responsiveness to another at the point of death (7:13; 10:33; 15:20; Elvey 2013; see also Grassi 2004). Here in the Benedictus, this mercy is a visitation (past and future), singular and repeated like the dawn (v78). Without explaining how this is to occur, the song evokes a transformation, expressed in the familiar terms of a movement from darkness to light, from ‘the shadow of death’ to life (v79). Life here means to have one’s feet guided/kept straight ‘in the way of peace’ (v79).

The song ends on this word peace (eirenes) as if this is where it was heading all along, from the military language of horns, the power language of lordship, the filial/servant/slave language of paidos, the language of the oppressed facing their enemies, toward the language of mercy which will become, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, mercy both toward and from another (‘the’ other)—and peace.

‘Peace’ is tricky in that Luke will contrast the peace (‘peace upon Earth’, 2:14), that arrives in the birth of the child Jesus, with the Pax Romana; and salvation as aphesis stands alongside the emperor as saviour. This is well-travelled ground in biblical studies. What I want to consider rather is the way Luke’s peace might be understood in relation to the ‘nonviolence’ described by Boochani. One aspect of Boochani’s writing that does not immediately seem to have a resonance in Luke’s Benedictus is the appeal to the consoling impact of the natural world and cross-species kindness. While cross-species kindness is not explicit anywhere in the Benedictus, the reference to anatole (east, dawn, morning, sunrise), in a way that is difficult to translate, suggests something of the impact of the natural world. Dawn and skies insert themselves as markers of—perhaps actors in—the drama of aphesis/freedom enabled by or through divine mercies.

In Boochani’s ‘Letter’ the enabling of freedom is not attributed (at least not explicitly) to a divine actor. Rather, community solidarity and natural beauty mutually reinforce each other in sustaining (with fragility at times) the hope that underscores the assertion and performance of freedom. It is a communal solidarity that performs compassion: the men’s solidarity for each other in practical ways; compassion for their companion dogs; and also for the readership, by calling Australians forth to a kind of metanoia (a change of heart) in relation to their own self-understanding, history and contemporary political social ethics. Poignantly, Boochani relates the fragility of this solidarity, freedom and compassion—this poetic performance in the face of violence:

This persisted until the moment we were confronted with the extremity of the violence. We found that the baton-wielding police had killed one of the dogs we had adopted into our community. At that moment, we descended into sorrow and wept,
in honour of its loyalty,
its beauty,
its innocence. (‘Letter’)

This was not the end of the story. Boochani relates other performative poetics of the men, and says toward the end of the ‘Letter’ that the ‘prison and its violence will never accept’ the reality of the ‘profound relationships’ the men built with local people, the environment, their adopted dogs, and each other.

Where the Benedictus refers to light shining on those sitting in the shadow of death, I read Boochani ‘in every situation the imprisoned lives and spirits have to reconfigure themselves in the face of death’ (‘Letter’). He goes on, ‘they avoid projecting the malevolent dimension of their existence as the most dominant’. He concludes his letter with appeals to feelings of friendship, compassion, companionship, justice and love.

The Benedictus closes with peace, and imagery that has shifted from a language of violence and violent resistance in its opening verses. It does not fully espouse nonviolent resistance, but opens a space for imagining what a way of peace might mean under the socio-cultural space impacted and shaped by the Roman empire. Biblical readers might extend this to the contemporary socio-political space of Australian violence toward asylums seekers, Indigenous peoples, Country and Earth itself. Peace in this context is more than nonviolent resistance, though this is part of it, more than the absence of war or of non-engagement in others’ wars, though this too is part of it. Peace is a socio-cultural ethos of aphesis—freedom in the face of oppression; freedom from oppression; freedom to turn from acts of oppression; freedom to recognise and resist our own imaginings of moral superiority; freedom for right relation not only with the divine and other humans, but also (and I would say especially, even primarily) with Earth; and freedom to be sustained by all of these.

Conclusion

I am in two minds about my drawing on Boochani’s work in this essay. On the one hand, I want to highlight the brilliance of his contemporary analysis of nonviolent action for an audience thinking about peace and nonviolence in biblical texts. On the other, while he and other asylum seekers and refugees remain in detention, I participate in their oppression as I enjoy the privileges of Australians society, and an essay like mine does little if anything to change this situation.

The prospect of a deep freedom for Australians remains out of reach while refugees like Boochani are kept in indefinite detention when they have committed no crime. If the Benedictus is addressed to people who are suffering oppression, albeit with the oppressors listening in, then we are the oppressors overhearing this song of protest that moves from violence to peace, and we are challenged to recognise ourselves and act. The way of peace that is the ‘end’ of the Benedictus means that like campaigners in Love Makes a Way, Writing through Fences and Grandmothers against Detention of Refugee Children, for example, Australian Christians must continue to work to support asylum seekers and refugees and act to change Government and Opposition policy on treatment of asylum seekers setting out to Australia by boat. An important part of this is speaking prophetically to those Christians who support such policies, including but not only in Government, especially in marginal electorates. The poetic styles of Boochani’s ‘A Letter from Manus’ and The Benedictus challenge us to find ways of speaking that enable a change of heart. The cruel practice of offshore detention which systematically denies freedom to some in order to deter others, means that at a deep level none of us are free.

Notes

1. Thank you to The Saturday Paper for permission to refer to and quote from Behrouz Boochani, ‘A Letter from Manus Island’ (The Saturday Paper, no. 186, December 9–15, 2017, pp. 1, 4).
2.  Many of the reports from Boochani’s ‘Letter’  appeared in Facebook feeds from refugee advocates, and Tim Costello spoke movingly at the Palm Sunday Rally outside the State Library of Victoria on 25 March 2018.
3.  Carter (2011) has considered the way the Benedictus alongside the Magnificat demonstrates the four aspects of protest songs he has identified, so for now I will not repeat that work. At present I offer a preliminary reading of the text. In a longer article, I propose to dialogue with several tropes of Boochani’s ‘Letter’, first the question of violence and second a supposed moral superiority by the oppressors, third the claim of freedom, fourth a more than human foundation for hope, fifth a haunting of the oppressive society by the oppressed, especially by the assertion of freedom of the oppressed. In conversation with these, I will consider some key terms and concepts from the Benedictus: divine visitation; salvation, redemption and release; enemies and hatred; slave/servant/child; ancestors; covenant/divine oath; prophets; mercy; death; peace; the poetics in the play of pronouns.

References and further reading

Bae, Hyun Ju. 2016. ‘Conversing with Luke on a Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace in Northeast Asia’. The Ecumenical Review 68, nos 2–3 (November): 167–84.
Boochani, Behrouz. 2018a. ‘Incarceration, Autonomy and Resistance on Manus Island’. Arena Magazine. https://arena.org.au/incarceration-autonomy-and-resistance-on-manus-island-by-behrouz-boochani/ Accessed March 31, 2018.
—. 2018b. ‘Four Years after Reza Berati’s Death, We Still Have No Justice’. The Guardian (February 17): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/17/four-years-after-reza-baratis-death-we-still-have-no-justice. Accessed March 31, 2018.
—. 2018c. No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Translated by Omid Tofighan. Sydney: Picador.
—. 2017a. ‘A Letter from Manus Island’. The Saturday Paper 186 (December 9–15): 1, 4. [‘Letter’]
—. 2017b. ‘Manus police pulled my hair and beat me. “You’ve damaged our reputation,” they said’. The Guardian (November 24): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2017/nov/24/manus-police-pulled-my-hair-and-beat-me-youve-damaged-our-reputation-they-said. Accessed March 2, 2018.
—. 2017c. ‘All We Want Is Freedom Not Another Prison Camp’. The Guardian (November 13): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/13/all-we-want-is-freedom-not-another-prison-camp. Accessed March 2, 2018.
—. 2017d. ‘The Refugess Are in a State of Terror on Manus’. The Guardian (October 31): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/31/the-refugees-are-in-a-state-of-terror-on-manus-behrouz-boochani. Accessed March 2, 2018.
—. 2017e. ‘Diary of Disaster: The Last Days inside Manus Island Detention Centre’. The Guardian (October 30): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/30/diary-of-disaster-the-last-days-inside-manus-island-detention-centre. Accessed March 2, 2018.
Bovon, François. 2002. Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50, translated by Christine M. Thomas. Hermeneia 63A; ed. Helmut Koester. Accordance electronic ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Brett, Mark G. 2016. Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Byrne, Brendan. 2000. The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel. Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls.
Carter, Warren. 2011. ‘Singing in the Reign: Performing Luke’s Songs and Negotiating the Roman Empire (Luke 1–2)’. In Luke-Acts and Empire: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Brawley, edited by David Rhoads, David Esterline, and Jae Won Lee, 23–43. Ebook. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 151. Eugene, OR: Pickwick.
—. 2006. The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide. Nashville: Abingdon.
Davidson, Helen. 2017. ‘Manus Island: UN says new accommodation “not ready” for refugees’. The Guardian (November 1): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/01/manus-island-un-says-new-accommodation-not-ready-for-refugees. Accessed March 2, 2018.
—. 2018a. ‘“Australia’s cut to healthcare on Manus Island inexplicable”, Amnesty says’. The Guardian (May 18): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/may/18/australias-cut-to-healthcare-on-manus-island-inexplicable-amnesty-says. Accessed July 30, 2018.
—. 2018b. ‘Rohingya Refugee Held on Manus Dies in Motor Vehicle Accident’. The Guardian (May 22): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/may/22/rohingya-refugee-held-on-manus-island-dies-in-motor-vehicle-incident. Accessed July 30, 2018.
Davidson, Helen and Ben Doherty. 2017. ‘Refugee and Journalist Behrouz Boochani Released after Arrest on Manus’. The Guardian (November 23): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/23/refugee-and-journalist-behrouz-boochani-arrested-in-manus-as-squad-steps-in. Accessed March 2, 2018.
Doherty, Ben. 2017a. ‘“The situation is critical”: Cholera fears on Manus as water and medicine run out’. The Guardian (November 20): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/20/the-situation-is-critical-cholera-fears-on-manus-as-water-and-medicine-run-out. Accessed March 2, 2018.
—. 2017b. ‘Manus refugee Behrouz Boochani asks for UK visa to attend screening of his film’. The Guardian (September 5): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/05/refugee-behrouz-boochani-asks-for-uk-visa-to-attend-screening-of-his-film. Accessed March 2, 2018.
Elvey, Anne. 2017. ‘Reading the Magnificat in Australia in Contexts of Conflict’. In Ecological Aspects of War: Engagements with Biblical Texts, edited by Keith Dyer and Anne Elvey, with Deborah Guess, 45–68. Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
—. 2013. ‘Rethinking Neighbour Love: A Conversation between Political Theology and Ecological Ethics’. In ‘Where the Wild Ox Roams’: Biblical Essays in Honour of Norman C. Habel, edited by Alan H. Cadwallader and Peter L. Trudinger, 58–75. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix.
—. 2009. ‘Can there be a forgiveness that makes a difference ecologically?: An eco-materialist account of forgiveness as freedom (aphesis) in the Gospel of Luke’. Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 22, no. 2 (June): 148–70
Flanagan, Richard. 2017. ‘Australia built a hell for refugees on Manus. The shame will outlive us all’. The Guardian (November 24): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/24/the-shame-of-the-evil-being-done-on-manus-will-outlive-us-all. Accessed March 2, 2018.
Ford, J. Massyngbaerde. 1984. My Enemy is My Guest: Jesus and Violence in Luke Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Gilbert, Gary. 2006. ‘Luke-Acts and the Negotiation of Authority and Identity in the Roman World’. In The Multivalence of Biblical Texts and Theological Meanings, edited by Christine Helmer and Charlene T. Higbe, 83–104. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Grandmothers against Detention of Refugee Children. http://gadrc.org/
Grassi, Joseph. 2004. Peace on Earth: Roots and Practices from Luke’s Gospel. Collegeville: Liturgical Press.
Guardian Staff. 2017. ‘Behrouz Boochani Wins Amnesty International Award for Writing from Manus’. The Guardian (November 2): https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/02/behrouz-boochani-wins-amnesty-international-award-for-writing-from-manus. Accessed March 2, 2018.
Hamilton, Andrew. 2017. ‘With Remembrance Goes Compassion: Manus’. Eureka Street 27, no. 23 (November 25): https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=54390. Accessed March 2, 2018.
Horsley, Richard A. 1989. The Liberation of Christmas: The Infancy Narratives in Social Context. New York: Crossroad.
Love Makes a Way. https://actionnetwork.org/groups/love-makes-a-way-australia
Marshall, I. Howard. 1978. The Gospel of Luke. NIGTC. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Neville, David J. 2013. A Peaceable Hope: Contesting Violent Eschatology in New Testament Narratives. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.
Pickett, Raymond. 2011. ‘Luke and Empire: An Introduction’. In Luke-Acts and Empire: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Brawley, edited by David Rhoads, David Esterline, and Jae Won Lee, 1–22. Ebook. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 151. Eugene, OR: Pickwick.
Reid, Barbara E. 2007. Taking up the Cross: New Testament Interpretations through Latina and Feminist Eyes. Minneapolis: Fortress.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. 1992. But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation. Boston: Beacon Press.
Syed, Sarah. 2018. ‘Responsibilities of Health Professionals Regarding the Refugee Crisis’. onthewards (March 26). https://onthewards.org/responsibilities-of-health-professionals-regarding-the-refugee-crisis/. Accessed July 30, 2018.
Writing through Fences. http://writingthroughfences.org/

ANNE ELVEY is an Australian poet, researcher and editor, author of White on White (Cordite Books 2018), Kin (FIP 2014), co-author with Massimo D’Arcangelo and Helen Moore of Intatto-Intact (La Vita Felice 2017), and editor of hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani (2018). Her most recent scholarly books are The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses (Sheffield Phoenix 2011), and as coeditor Ecological Aspects of War: Engagements with Biblical Texts (Bloomsbury T&T Clark 2017). She is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics and holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, Melbourne. https://anneelvey.wordpress.com/

Bonny Cassidy reviews João by John Mateer

August 2, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

João

by John Mateer
 
Giramondo, 2017
 
ISBN:978-1-925336-62-7
 
Reviewed by BONNY CASSIDY

Speaking recently in Adelaide, the expatriate Australian theorist Sneja Gunew proposed that nations are the museums of identity. I took her to mean that, regardless of our status as foreigner/visitor or citizen/member, we tour them—we observe national identity being curated and performed. But can we resign from identifying our self through nationality; can we inhabit another kind of space that is not even partly defined by it?

In João, John Mateer insists that we – or, at least, that he – can. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert Wood concludes of the book: ‘This is its post-colonial hope, not that we forget empire but that we enter more fully into our own histories, experiences, and observations as a way to see where we are now.’ In the past, Mateer has been burned by cultural transgression. His response has been to go deeper into a meditation on displacement and self, to excuse his poetry from the responsibility or expectation of representing nationality.

At one point in João, the titular persona regretfully snaps at Gary Snyder for querying his nationali-ty, as if it could be a subject of interest beyond customs counters. For João, existence is a constant effort to find release from this static and collective identity. In this collection a postcolonial reading of Mateer’s poetics intersects with the Buddhist concepts with which he frames and guides the poems. In particular, these concepts refer to anattā or non-self, and rebirth. It is a fruitful, intri-cate combination that troubles the illusion of selfhood – and anything as lumpen as a nationalistic identity – through the arts of moving, seeing and expression.

Signifiers of Buddhism can be found in the architecture of the book. Its concentric, mandala-like arrangement seems to circumambulate the poems’ themes and personae. The first, long sequence of sonnets, ‘Twelve Years of Travel’ is bookended by images of mummified corpses: emblems of our corporeal emptiness. They are husks that reassure João of his travelling nature. The second, short sequence, ‘Memories of Cape Town’, opens and closes with images of ‘the Void’, or Śūnyatā. Here, Mateer provides a simile for João, who is a hollow persona; and also a larger concept to describe João’s motile way of moving through the world.

The nature of poetic voice in João is also informed by Buddhism. From the first sonnet, at a Japa-nese temple:

He closed his eyes, felt lost, slowly
recalling, within the depths of his dim, honeycomb body
[…]
and the monk,
blessing them with a long leafy branch, beckoned
him in to also pay homage to the transparent box,
the mummified saint. João heard: He could also be you…

João is narrated in the third-person and past tense. The voice is Mateer’s – or a simulacrum of authorial perspective – and it is addressed to João, Mateer’s alter-ego. This complicated handling of voice establishes the sense of an immediacy, a presence, that has passed into a cloud of resonance and metamorphosis; a ricochet between self and non-self. The persona of João is a delicious lyric tactic with plenty of critical potential. Mateer can make the character as thick or thin as he likes, and ‘explain’ nothing. This flexibility is poetry’s prerogative and it also serves Mateer’s themes. In João, the narrative construction is most agile when Mateer takes potshots at his persona’s cosmopolitanism and questions his ego: ‘Could that be the loss he needs to unremember? Who knows?’ It calcifies when he errs into the role of pervy, melancholy flaneur or clingy nostalgia: ‘João, like the watching servants, was alone, forgotten.’ Mateer’s attempts to maintain a suspended, ironic perspective on João is necessarily flawed. Some of these flaws are insightful, delivered with Mateer’s typical, self-parodying note; others, which I’ll turn to a little later, are less obviously knowing but remain consistent with the book’s theme of a constant struggle to exit self-interest.

In ‘Twelve Years of Travel’, each sonnet contributes a picaresque episode that defines place along the axis of time. João is Odysseus – or, more appropriately, Vasco de Gama – never returning home, because he recognises no such referent. Or perhaps he is Bashō, seeking home and family in always new forms and abodes. From Venice to Honolulu, Mateer defines place by inhabitation and by its having been witnessed: ‘Naples begins with two Nigerians on a train’. By the same rule, places disappear, like a page turning, when the protagonist decides to exit. In China:

Remembering the clay warriors, the horsemen and commanders, each
dedicated to the habit of war, that human selfishness,
João tells himself: ‘Become Nothingness, that golden wilderness!’

Rather than diaristic, though, the rhythm of the book is essayistic. The usual Mateer tropes are here: ghosts, doubles, shadows, angels (including Singaporean poet, Cyril Wong). While familiar, they do provide thematic motifs that remind us of Mateer’s philosophical concerns. The Shakespearean sonnet form achieves a neat topping and tailing of each episode, whilst creating a resonant echo. To his credit Mateer casually inhabits the form, frequently employing imperfect or even blank end rhymes when an image calls for release:

Deep in this tropical cinema João, somewhere,
swam with turtles and nymphs, followed endless, lava-strewn roads.

A limp conclusion, however, is sometimes the result of a forced rhyming couplet:

their feet sensing an intricate, inland maze.
Watching them on that mandala, João was silently, joyously amazed.

The romance of the sonnet, a form that always resembles a heaving and corseted bosom, is one example of the tension within João’s journeying. Mateer’s exoticisation of João’s travels is unashamed: every place is fantastic, such as the hellishly ‘baroque’ Naples and the ‘cinema’ of Hawaii’s landscapes. In this mode, Mateer is committed to reminding us that ‘poems are … only the heard, overheard’. But João’s view of the world – which is also the view held by the authorial narrator – is constantly threatening to narrow and stagnate. An appreciation of passing beauty becomes a reflection of João’s selfhood—his aesthetics, his tastes, his history. He struggles to abandon his African upbringing, the temptation to a sense of fixed belonging: ‘João left the dinner, yearning for Africa, unconfused.’ Similarly, the locus of cultural influence that has occupied Mateer’s recent books – Portugal and its empire – remains a constant touchstone throughout João.

While such texts including The Quiet Slave (2017) and Unbelievers, or the Moor (2013) achieve a sense of situated history – time on the axis of ideology, custom and language – the sonnets of João drag their anchors along. João tries to belong nowhere, owe nothing, and leave no trace of himself. While Mateer explores João’s struggle to achieve this, none of the secondary characters play an active part in the struggle, least of all João’s string of female lovers. In João, women are given a role that serves the persona’s suspension of self. The introduction of a woman leads several of the sonnets in ‘Twelve Years of Travel’, she often taking the form of a local guide or former lover. There is yearning, sentimentality, sympathy, even ‘fatherliness’ on the part of João, but the typical outcome of his meetings with women is sexual. Are they destinations of embodiment, then; reminders of mutability? The importance of sex to the book’s themes is undoubtable: it’s where João is reminded most constantly of being ‘a simple corpse, unhaunted fetish.’ But to undertake such a traditionally patriarchal deployment of female bodies and voices seems an inconsistently uncritical habit. Mateer’s representation of women has been questioned before. Paul Hetherington, reviewing Unbelievers for the Sydney Review of Books, remarked that it ‘risks being implicated in the exploitative tropes that it tries to subvert and critique.’ In João the accumulation of women’s names (which, like the locations in the book, generally appear once and then evaporate into memory) comes to resemble a diary of conquest—an irony of mode that I am unsure is deliberate. Significantly, they are rarely writers (one is a novelist, and João is mistaken for her husband) although some are permitted the role of angelic translators. Correcting him, humouring him, encouraging him, or gently ridiculing him, they may be intended as a parodic tool in João’s pathway to non-self; but, as Robert Wood has pointed out, ultimately women become yet more reflections of João.

This gendered tradition is impotent and tired, lacking reflexivity. Could Mateer have more deeply troubled the concept of stable selfhood; could he have widened the parodic gap between ego and alter-ego? Could he have brought them uncomfortably, searchingly closer? At one point João agrees that JM Coetzee is a ‘science fiction’ writer, a remark that comparatively highlights the safeness of Mateer’s collection. Perhaps Mateer’s commitment to owning João is crucial to the philosophy of discomfort behind these poems, yet it also keeps them slackly, comfortably tethered to authenticity.

This is a problem because authenticity of self is questioned by the very order of the book’s two parts. Its second sequence, the succinct ‘Memories of Cape Town’ features Mateer’s authorial voice, narrating the younger João through the perspective of the older João. The placement of the childhood memories after the long travel sequence, reminds us of ‘voidness’, that childhood is not a ‘key’ to a constant self. Rather, João’s memories (or the narrator’s memories of them) are focused on negations of fixity. In this childhood, João desired to ‘stow away’ in order to avoid becoming ‘castaway’. His model is an uncle Carlos, born in Rio and with a ‘tour guide mode, switching languages’ while driving his nephew through Cape Town: this is where young João learns to see ‘the world anew’. Here, also, is a grandmother from somewhere placeless ‘between India / and grim London’, who in João’s eyes is awesome for ‘being lost’: this is where he learns mournfully that he may not claim ‘to be African’. Here is where he learns cynicism about national futures, particularly neocolonial ones; and the ‘Queen’s English’ features more than once as a revelation ‘untrue’ identity. Finally, in these episodes from Cape Town, João learns of fate: the archetypal journey in which ‘Men roam the world to be fatherless’.

Is Mateer saying that existence is a realisation of a predictable plot? Is this his doubt? Is João’s wandering pre-determined by something other than karma? Or is there another, more consistent understanding of the idea? Its Old Testament view seems at odds with the book’s central references to non-self and voidness. As the last line of ‘Memories from Cape Town’ proffers: ‘Mother is space, and her depths you’. In light of the latter concepts, I do not read this ‘Mother’ as the feminised, Marian type, critiqued by Darren Aronofsky’s namesake film of 2017; instead, it seems appropriate to interpret ‘Mother’ as Saṃsāra—the cycle of birth and rebirth. Is Mateer, therefore, reinterpreting fatherlessness as a description of release from this cycle?

Here I want to return to Gunew’s gambit about nations. If nations are museums of identity, João is the ultimate museum-goer. Always guest and local, he tours destinations like vast, curious dioramas. He is rarely frightened of otherness, rather, he finds a source of common humanity and beauty wherever he goes. As Mateer reiterates: ‘We know João, our poet, loves museums, objects and their fame’. He loves aura in the Benjaminian sense of the word. He loves history, its cumulative layers and relational tangents. But this doesn’t mean he loves nationality, that is, collective identity based on citizenship.

Since Southern Barbarians (2011) Mateer has resolutely steered away from Australian referents and settings in his poems. I miss Australia in Mateer’s poetry; not because it somehow validates Australia’s national claim upon him, or because I want to recognise my own heritage in what I read, but because his Australian poems were fearless and grungy. In mode, they remind me of John A Scott’s contemporaneous poems, with their surreal scapes and meta-narration. In João, Mateer sets one poem in Victoria, at the Portuguese festival at Warrnambool—a celebration of pre-British identity in the Australian founding narrative, and a less familiar image of modern settlement. I enjoyed its collage of unfixed horizon points, its freedom from defining ‘multiculturalism’. Yet, in the manner of the book’s lesser style, it is a romantic sonnet to a lost love around which otherness is a pretty frame. I respect that Mateer’s voice has grown away from his earlier style, but I do wonder: what does João see when he visits Mateer’s home in Perth? Is it the globular suburbia of Corey Wakeling’s The Alarming Conservatory? Wakeling is a poet whose migrant parents inflect and also inflict his sense of Perth’s mediocrity; he also now sets himself elsewhere, looking back and forward to an Australia that is the subject of nostalgia, memory, long distance travel and calls. A comparative reading of space and place in these two recent books from Giramondo might yield interesting dialogues.

In João the stateless states of ex-patriate and Buddhist meet one another. They reveal one another. Being at home with being a constant visitor, learning how to be ‘lost’, is João’s path to enlightenment:

a passing through this world into deeper memory,
a searching for what’s beyond Elsewhere, an enquiry
into your previous lives

In this context, nationality is the most base illusion of selfhood and João’s physical travel is a portal out of the self. If he is a fantasy of fatherlessness, then João’s previous lives need not reside with the identity of his author-narrator. If he is a form or a product of meditation, João might reveal more than the current material body through which he passes. Fitfully, Mateer continues to craft proof of what does not exist.

 
BONNY CASSIDY is the author of three poetry collections, and lectures in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne. She is feature reviews editor of Cordite Poetry Review and co-editor of the Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016). Bonny’s essays of criticism and poetics have been published widely in Australia and internationally.