March 22, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Derrida’s Breakfast
By David Brooks
Brandl & Schlesinger
ISBN 978-1-921556-99-9
Reviewed by JONATHAN DUNK
This slender but wide-ranging collection of essays approaches the question of the animal from a number of complimentary and dialectic angles. Conceived through different paradigms and contexts a figure of the animal emerges in philosophy and poetics functioning as a liminal mechanism, a boundary stone constructed to police the edges of the structures and systems of the human image. The historical force of this translation of animal being is such that its ethically obvious and urgent problematics are stymied by the aporetic tensions implicated in any rethinking of the animals we are and are not.
This is elucidated most concretely in the volume’s titular essay, which interrogates one of the more salient iterations of the conceptualised animal’s tendency towards paradox. Derrida’s turn towards the question of the animal in his late phase stands among the more spectacular and influential developments in recent animal philosophy. Most notably in The Animal That Therefore I am (2008), but also elsewhere, Derrida pursued his own deconstructive method to its ‘logical’ implication, and with characteristic force, that “the animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living creature.” Like many scholars, Brooks is sensible of the generative energy of this critique, however he situates it in the context of material ethics to examine why Derrida’s brilliant explication of this lacuna did not translate into more substantive political action, and specifically into consistent vegetarianism. The conjectured Derridean answer is that vegetarianism qua vegetarianism constitutes a foreclosure, a release of the tensions of ethical doubt, or in David Wood’s terms, an attempt to “buy good conscience on the cheap” (22). Understandably, Brooks reads this gesture as a sophistry, and interprets this hesitation more generatively through several forms of structural psychoanalysis. Derrida’s incongruous hesitation becomes an iteration of an Oedipal “deep doubling that seems both endemic and epidemic when it comes to thinking the animal” (26, emphasis Brooks’.) This doubling effects a form of circular or helical ressintement, a misrecognition of the possible connections between philosophy and the literal animal – prompting an attempt to cure system with system. In effect this means that Deconstruction is finally as incapable of addressing animal suffering as other intellections, which remain complicit with the metonymy of domination: “the mind alone, Western and otherwise, is for the moment so enmeshed in defences of its own monstrosity that no such leap is possible to it” (33). While generative, Brooks is being deliberately obtuse here, and owns the “naïve, crude and simplistic” (33) aspects of this reading on the firm ethical imperative that drives it. This move is successfully justified, but it remains the most tenuous aspect of the volume’s intellectual structure. It rests on a lamentably ubiquitous mistranslation of il n’y a pas de hors-texte and – knowingly albeit – evades the colossal significance of Derrida’s final efforts in The Beast & The Sovereign, which, certainly, speak more lucidly to the latter part of the dialectic, articulating the last gasps of the Pax Americana then transpiring in the disastrous stupidities of the euphemistic War on Terror. This measured criticism notwithstanding, this essay is a rigorous challenge to the ethical limitations of philosophy’s hegemony over praxis.
This argument is extended and clarified in terms of the particular semantics with which the word of the animal is invested in the second and third essays ‘The Loaded Cat’, and ‘Meeting Place’ which perform strong, nuanced readings of figurations of the animal in a range of literatures. The latter effects a particularly striking revision of Derrida’s own reading of D.H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’, in which the philosopher mistakes, or prefers, an allusion to Coleridge’s sacral, innocent albatross, for Baudelaire’s self-piteous anthropomorphism. The difference inflects Lawrence’s reading of the animal palpably: Brooks’ interprets the poem as a mea culpa, an admission of the absurd arrogance implicit extending the obligations of hospitality – the master-theme of hospice being property – to the animal in its alterity. Derrida’s reading however, like the persona’s final futile gesture of anger at the snake’s trespass asserts the closure of ethics, and of philosophy, even as it ruptures it.
I found the collection’s final essay ‘At Duino’ its most provocative. Here Brooks’ concentrates the nuance and rigour of his critique specifically upon poetics, and the implications – political, aesthetic, and psychological – of the Orphic tradition. At a conceptual level the influence of this tradition, or complex, likely touches most European elegiac forms, but it’s present with particular intensities in the work of Rilke. Exemplifying his broader attempt to make philosophy stand upon the question of animal suffering, Brooks revises the Orphic myth through the eleventh poem in the second book of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus written in response to observing an expedition of dove-hunters. The poem is unsettlingly powerful, and the “handful of pale doves” (82) flung from darkness into light are figured as a readily appropriable resource for Eurydicean metaphor, a ritual of rhapsody. The Karst doves are disturbed from their limestone caves by lowered lengths of linen cloth which, as one of the poem’s shifting apostrophic subjects actuate their paradoxical connotations – cerecloth and virginal robe – into a figure of sacrifice – a being sacrificed to the chthonic deity of the darkness below, interpretable as a register of negative capability. In return for the temporal sacrifice of the beloved in time, the poet receives the enduring stasis of the rarefied art object, a “calmly established rule of death.” This paradigm has been the subject of extensive revisions. Among many others, Blanchot in The Space of Literature argues that the movement of the orphic project:
“does not want Euridice in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face… not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have her living in the plenitude of death.”
Art, in this configuration, desires the beloved through the beloved’s displacement into art. Such is the power of that displacement that Rilke abjures pity, on the grounds that: “Killing too is a form of our ancient wandering affliction” (emphasis Rilke’s). This logic is observable in many of Rilke’s poems, including Requiem for a Friend written a decade before the Sonnets. Brooks’ singles out this poem because it clarifies his wider argument of a metonymy between the Orphic sacralising of death, and the ease with which we justify animal slaughter. Thus violence becomes the poem’s deep theme: culture’s ‘rules of death’ are seen to subsist upon a model of Cartesian dominion, whose first symbol is the hunt. If this reading seems too atavistic or bluntly Freudian for relevance, consider John Taggart’s discussion in Conjunctions of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson: “the poet becomes a hunter by putting on power… Power is pitiless”. It’s worth noting here that Taggart and Howe draw heavily on Heideggerian schematics, particularly the notion of the Open as a site or space of disclosure, itself drawn originally from Rilke. The song of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld becomes the aestheticized violence of the hunt by which Heideggerian poetics assume the risk of composition in language’s wilderness – read as ‘wilderness’ a waste land theatre of projected solitudes, not a living ecology. The fascist implications here are obvious, and even without them the slippage inherent to metaphor renders death itself becomes thinkable as poem, as a cultural meaning rather than a horizon of event, of which it doesn’t take much to see the twentieth century’s industrial symphony of deaths as a synonym.
To utter peace to the animal, Brooks argues, we must liberate poetics from the power of Orphic myth. A functional poetics must be cognisant of death however – not least of its own – and at this juncture Brooks doesn’t suggest what an Anti-Orphic poem might look like. John Kinsella, another Australian Derridean – for want of much better words – and who appears in Brooks’ acknowledgements, illustrates a possible direction in the third movement of his poem ‘Graphology: Pastoral Elegy – An End Written for the End When it Comes’:
- Signing Off
It was always going to finish in an airless room,
sketchbook air freshener, deodoriser;
only enough light coming through; substantives
plebiscite, like planting crops
in carpet-folds. Furrow is all
there is, the biro’s ink run away
from ballpoint, dry bearing. Signed books
can’t go back to the publisher, unsold
remain in limbo. I sign off, wheatbelt
poet, anarchist, for whom copyright
was something others did:
Eros, artworks, the dark.
This poem faces its own aporia without the involution of a doubled other, and without veiling its own means of production in metaphysics. Its power is piteous in every sense, gesturing beyond the narcissine projections of the Orphic gaze, and the fascist onanisms of the hunt.
NOTES
- Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans Ann Smock, Nebraska UP, 1982, 172.
- Derrida, 208, 392
- Taggart Conjunctions no. 11 (1988, 270-273)
- Graphology Poems 1995-2015 Volume II, 5 Islands Press, 2016, 184.
December 10, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Getting By Not Fitting In
by Les Wicks
Island
Reviewed by CAROL JENKINS
Getting By Not Fitting In is Les Wick’s thirteenth book. As someone who has arrived at poetry latish, thirteen seems a lot of books. What would one have left to say? Plenty it seems. I came to Getting By Not Fitting In, after reading Sea of Heartbreak (Unexpected Resilience)(Puncher & Wattmann, —a good place for readers new to Wick’s work start. Getting By Not Fitting In (GBNFI) possesses the same Wickensian kaleidoscopic concision, wit and dexterity as Sea of Heartbreak. There is something Ginsberg-esque about Wick’s range and anti-hero stance, his keen eye for the cultural milieu, we have the Golden Age of Sydney Pub Music instead of The Beats, but without Ginsberg’s grandiosity and neurotica.
The collection is set out in seven thematic sections; the first two look at men and woman in general, and the next two others take up the themes of their namesakes’ Narrative and Location, the following two parts build portraits of the characters Matt Kovacs and Tess Manning, and the last section, ‘What Ends’ forms a coda.
There is a gritty piquancy in Getting By Not Fitting In. Wicks has a keen eye for how society bends people into and out of shape. The title suggests a study of those living on the margins, but in Getting By the marginalised become the mass market—a phenomena we have seen play out in the USA with Trump’s triumph in selling snake oil to the disenfranchised. We find the mass market, and the masses, messy as they are, concern Wicks, in general and in particular. His poem a ‘Brief History of the Mass Market’, is pulled into focus by the mass media — movies, TV sitcoms and Facebook, as the poem skips from Annie Oakley, through Glen Miller and comes around to the FBI it is constantly nearly making an argument. On one level it is seems lucid but on another just beyond coherence, and so works to deliver a symptom as well as a synopsis, he seems to be saying, take this dose of not-quite confusion, not-quite denouement, our cultural chaos.
Amongst the tea candle economics in the first section ‘The Company of Women’ there is an unsettling sense of living in housing commission high rise on benefits, even when the poem is located in suburban garden, as in ‘Suburban Fabric’ where the characters are scrapping by, even the social-worker downwardly mobile. All this makes for a disturbingly real atmosphere. For those in government that argue we are a classless society Getting By Not Fitting In would a salutary read, showing us as all the greasy perplexities of a society that accepts or ignores those whose lives teeter into poverty.
Something similarly disarming happens when Wicks re-jigs the common slang. He has a penchant for reversals, ‘dodo as dead hill of the king’ in ‘A Staunch Life in Common Sense’ The reframing leaves the reader acutely adrift in the every day language of ‘Common Sense’ where the protagonist’s easy shortcuts act as a kind of social anesthetic— a Novocain for the relationships that a certain type of men have with society. The witty reversals of sets, ‘chicken gum and chewing wire’ gives a visceral churn, a nearly queasy undoing of language that supplies an air of surrealism to what might be a study for a character in an Australian version of BBC TV series ‘Shameless’.
Location brings us Sydney in spades, the kind you might dig a grave for your dog with. Wick is an aficionado of the multi-use homophonic sequence, ‘Oatley Pleasure Ground’ we progress through, leaden, leading, led a little further on to the laconic turn of ‘a new toilet block—/strident stainless steel like Soviet dentistry’.
‘Oatley’, is too clear-eyed to be nostalgic. While the title gives you its temporal setting, so we settle acutely into the park alongside the St Georges river. While Oatley was not one of my youthful haunts, it could easily be Woy Woy or Ettalong, with its sunburnt lawns and inadequate trees, and of course that telling toilet block. I came back to the Soviet dentistry simile a number of times when I read and reread this poem — like a wobbly tooth you can’t stop wriggling— there is a jab of painful accuracy to it, a stab of recognition, which strangely gives an odd sense of ownership to this piece of Oatley though I’ve never been there, and the poem is an invitation not to, but I might as well have been there, so closely does it evoke its period and hanging out at the beach or waterfront. As with many of these poems, we are connected, and, as he counsels on the final page of Getting By Not Fitting In, that interlocking might just be the point.
In ‘The Sydney Problem’ Wicks tweaks the old Tinsel Town tag to Trinket Town, while skewering our collective lack of determination to preserve ‘historic clutter’ — the deprecation of history to clutter, suggesting both an authorial complicity and culpability in this problem, and so deftly avoiding what is one of the most annoying postures in contemporary poetry, ‘eco-piety’, to steal Peter Kirkpatrick’s elegantly coined term, though here it the subgenre ‘preservo-piety’ would be more accurate.
In the fifth and sixth sections we find first Matt Kovacs and then Tess Manning, two people in overlapping stages of drug fueled downward spirals, each new opportunity a new chance to demonstrate their penchant for destruction. These two parts and final coda might be a crazy storyboard for a TV series, Wicks’ writing here is filmic, an evocation of place and mood. These sections work something like a mini-verse novel and there is drive to the storyline that is more top-less grunge than bodice ripper. When we get to the seventh part , ‘The Sixth Intersection’, where Matt and Tess, our characters, briefly intersect, both asking the other ‘Are you happy?’ and go their ways, leaving us to ours, and giving us something substantial to ponder.
CAROL JENKINS is an Australian writer and publisher. She lives with her family in Sydney, near Balmoral Beach. Coming to poetry from a career in chemical regulation, her first poem was published in 2004. She has two collections of poetry Fishing in the Devonian (2008) and Xn, 2013 both from Puncher & Wattman. Her most recent book and silliest book is Select Episodes from the Mr Farmhand Series. In 2007 Carol launched River Road Press, which has recorded and published 21 audio CDs of Australian poets. She has a blog Show Me The Treasure (www.showmethetreasure.blogspot.com.au
October 14, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Have Been And Are
by Brook Emery
ISBN: 978 0 994 5275 3 0
GloriaSMH Press
Thinking Poetry: Brook Emery’s have been and are (Gloria SMH, 2016)
[From the launch speech given at the Friend in Hand Hotel in Glebe on Saturday 10 September, 2016.]
Welcome everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Luke Fischer. I’m a poet and philosopher, and this afternoon I have the great pleasure and honour of launching Brook Emery’s splendid new book of poems, his fifth collection have been and are, published by the new Melbourne press Gloria SMH. Jacinta Le Plastrier, whom many of you would also know as the current director of Australian Poetry and who formerly worked at John Leonard Press, is the publisher and co-founder of Gloria SMH. At the outset I’d like to congratulate Jacinta and her colleagues on the beautiful production and design of this book.
While I am quite used to swapping between my philosopher’s hat and my poet’s hat, in certain cases this is neither appropriate nor adequate. Sometimes it is necessary to wear both hats at once, one balanced on top of the other, or the two stitched together. This is eminently the case with respect to Brook Emery’s poetry.
At times, when art and poetry aim for a philosophical significance they end up reproducing in an inferior manner a theoretical content that would be better articulated in a philosophical treatise or essay. This is evident in what for the present purposes I will call ‘second-rate conceptual art’. However, this is not true of the best conceptual art nor is it true of Brook Emery’s poetry. The philosophising that takes place in Brook’s poetry, both at the level of form and content, is worked out poetically, is native to the poetry, and in significant respects gets at aspects of experience and the world in a manner that surpasses conventional modes of philosophical articulation. For instance, the question and nature of embodiment and perception are key concerns of philosophers, but there are few, if any, philosophers who are able to describe embodied experience as richly and concretely as Brook’s poetry. In addition, whereas philosophers usually present their readers with their polished arguments and conclusions, Brook’s poetry invites the reader into a philosophy in process, the mind at work in questioning and deliberating. There are, of course, important strands of twentieth and twenty-first century European thought in which philosophical writing has become more literary and poetic than it has traditionally been. In this respect Brook’s poetry can be viewed as a significant contribution within a larger cultural movement in which philosophy approaches poetry and poetry approaches philosophy.
The title of Brook’s new book, have been and are, is extracted from the last sentence of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and intimates a central theme of the book: the relation between past and present, and time in its various forms and scales, including the geological time of evolution, human history, autobiography, transience and human mortality. The full sentence from Darwin is also the title of the penultimate poem: ‘Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful / have been and are being evolved’. And Brook’s poems relatedly suggest how the continuity between past and present lies in change and transformation, and the present is evolving into the future.
have been and are is at once expansive in its explorations of diverse and significant themes and impressively cohesive, a livre composé. The titles of all the poems, except the final one, are quotations selected from a wide range of texts by poets, philosophers, scientists, novelists, historians, anthropologists, musicians, artists, and others… Each poem responds to, expands on, subtly critiques or digresses from the content suggested by its title-quotation. What is implied by much poetry, namely that each poem one writes is in conversation with other poems and poets, and with poetic traditions as one understands and evaluates them, is explicitly embedded in the book’s architectonic and inner workings. The individual poems are also filled with direct references as well as subtle allusions to other texts and thereby develop further intertextual connections.
The book’s cohesiveness is also evident in the way each poem picks up or develops a thread from the preceding poem. Every poem ends with an ellipsis, which serves to indicate its open-endedness and its anticipation of the subsequent poem as a complement and supplement to what has thus far been elaborated. The themes of the book organically emerge, develop and transform, and the poems enter into dialogue with one another as well as with the reader. As suggested by the epigraph from Virginia Woolf that opens the collection, we find ‘a voice answering a voice’, including the poet speaking and responding to himself. At both a macro and a micro scale the structure of the book reflects the title-quotation of one of the poems, which is taken from the American poet Robert Hass: ‘Echo, repetition, statement / and counterstatement, digression and return’.
While at the level of form and content Brook is interested in the possibility of cohesiveness, he is opposed to any kind of closure. Brook is just as interested, if not more interested, in the ways in which we misconstrue ourselves and the world as he is in experiences of belonging. In this poetry we find a poet-philosopher restlessly interrogating what in German Idealist philosophy was called the Absolute, a supposed ultimate unity of mind and world, spirit and nature, thought and being. For Brook any sense of ultimate unity can only be momentary or provisional and thus not ultimate: the feeling of beauty or harmony fades, what we assume to be true is subject to revision.
A significant philosophical insight underlies Brook’s emphasis on both the necessity of a relationship between self and world and a disjunction between them. The very problem of knowledge presupposes disunity as a starting point. An omniscient god would know and experience unity but would have no questions and could not make errors of judgment. There would be no problem of knowledge as everything would be ever-present and evident. As human adults we also do not have the option of retreating into a prelapsarian existence, of returning to childhood, or of enjoying the unknowing unity and bliss that Rilke ascribed to primitive animals, which possess sentience but are far from the human form of self-consciousness that divides us from any immediate sense of oneness with the world.
It is the gap between ourselves and the world, language and experience, thought and being that makes it possible for us to establish some connection between them. In one of the late poems in have been and are Brook develops this notion with the image of shadows: ‘Shadows are an intercession / between me and not me, a suspension // between “I feel” and “it must mean.” Words / shadow other words, shadow other worlds…’ There is a slight gap between what we aim to say and what we manage to say. The very first poem includes the following lines near its beginning: ‘There’s a dappled light falling / across my forearms… Mmm…there’s that word ‘dappled’, that won’t do. It’s not a bad word…’ and the poem proceeds to reflect on the spaces and connections between linguistic predication and being. It is worthwhile to mention that Brook’s interrogation of how we speak about the natural environment makes a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to crucial concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and ecopoetics, and the specific need to find a way of bridging a postmodern awareness of the constructive role of language with a realism about the natural world that is being destroyed.
One of the many remarkable features of Brook’s poetry is the protean way in which it moves between walking, swimming or body-surfing and speculation, evocative description and philosophical reflection, and also seamlessly unites them. Take this description involving seaweed: ‘I float on my belly as still as can be /in the softly lulling swell. Sea-grasses / and rasp-edged kelp float back and forth in unison / or a quarter tone off key, caught and tweaked / by competing currents.’ We have here at one and the same time a vivid image of floating seaweed and the encapsulation of a broad philosophical idea that there is a cohesion to the world but not a perfect harmony; the musical metaphor of a choir singing in unison is qualified by the subsequent judgement that the voices are a ‘quarter tone off key’.
Brook is often a brilliant imagist and offers the reader moments in which he/she experiences a sense of participation in a re-enchanted nature. However, he does not want us to remain captivated. That would be a naïve and self-deceiving return to childhood. Here is an example from the short poem that is titled with a quotation from Piet Mondrian: ‘I, too, find the flower beautiful / in its outward appearance: but a deeper beauty / lies concealed within’:
I’m trying to remember a train trip south,
the particulars or even the generality. The glass-grey,
reflective flatness of the river, the immobility
of the tethered boats (their patched and peeling hulls),
a passage through split rock (weather-dulled, oxide blotched).
And trees, eucalypts stretching back and up the hillside,
textured, darting light shifting slantwise into shadow,
picking out this or that, catching at the eye.
I am inventing this, the verbal surface of things…
The poem opens by drawing us into its descriptions of scenery from a remembered train trip, but then as though telling the reader not to get too absorbed, not to fall asleep, we encounter the self-reflexive line: ‘I am inventing this, the verbal surface of things…’ Children, when they watch a puppet show, almost take the puppets for animate creatures and are oblivious of the human hands, rods, and strings operating behind the scenes. In Brook’s poem it’s as though the show were interrupted mid-scene and the instruments exposed to view, but in this case the instrument is language.
It is arguable that the advent of free verse as a dominant approach to writing poetry in the early twentieth century reflects a larger cultural process of fragmentation and individuation, of dissonance between the individual and the collective. Brook himself places this development within a broad historical context when he writes: ‘The old verities – Christianity, Communism, rhyme and metre – are dimmed…’ Nevertheless, even though free verse cannot adopt a pregiven form, this does not mean that it is formless or arbitrary, that it lacks aesthetic cohesion. T. S. Eliot famously criticised, as did Denise Levertov later in the twentieth century, the adjective ‘free’ in ‘free verse’ because of its implication of arbitrariness. While I don’t share this objection because there are other relevant ways of construing the word ‘free’, the significant point is that any successful poem must convince us that there is an integrity or even necessity in the way it is constructed.
Brook’s poems are assiduously and masterfully crafted free verse compositions, which reflect and embody the dynamism of his poetic philosophy. They at once accentuate the temporality of the unfolding poem and the temporality of thought in progress. Like the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, as well as Hegel and Heidegger, Brook has a deep interest in contradiction and apparent contradictions. He also loves paradoxes, oxymorons, chiasmi, and aporias. Like a poetic equivalent of Hegel’s progression of thought through the generation of contradictions in The Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a dialectical momentum to Brook’s poems. The very first poem in the collection begins with: ‘It’s not about me…and of course / it is.’ Not much later we find the statement: ‘This book is all about / how lucky I am to be walking under these trees…’ The reader can surmise that, of course, it is not really all about this, but only partly about this. The poems propel themselves forward through judgments that are shown to be provisional, through negations, qualifications, contrasting propositions, and revisions. The poem with a title drawn from Wallace Stevens, ‘The poem must / resist the intelligence almost successfully…’ begins as follows: ‘I’m dawdling. Killing time. Or time / is killing me…’. These lines employ a device that in classical rhetoric was distinguished as an antimetabole. The terms of the proposition ‘I’m…killing time’ are reversed in the statement ‘time is killing me’ to epigrammatic effect. Characteristically Brook has also placed an ‘or’ before ‘time is killing me’, highlighting the provisionality of this second judgment.
If Brook were a painter, in an analogous manner to Cézanne’s late watercolours he would leave many white spaces in his paintings, so as to allow the viewer to imaginatively decide on how they might be filled in. Or he would paint his canvas in layers while ensuring that the later layers allow the earlier layers of paint to peer through. He certainly would not aim for the realism of the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis whose painted grapes were supposedly so realistic that birds flew down and pecked at them. Rather, he would leave clear evidence of the brushstrokes on the canvas.
Brook himself refers to a number of painters in the collection (Mondrian, Hokusai and others) and one of the passages, which comes as close as Brook gets to encapsulating his philosophy, involves a description of a painter. Those of you who are familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology will recognise the deep affinity to his philosophy in the following lines, which present the invisible as the other side of the visible rather than as other-worldly or as merely subjective:
From this angle or that perspective, day after day,
in painting after painting, an artist friend tries to capture light,
not capture, not even render, tries to apprehend light’s temptations
on cloud and sea. It’s a search for the invisible in what is visible,
something that depends on sense but is beyond the senses,
what cannot be expressed without distortion: the reflective
and absorbent qualities of water, the way it is sometimes grey,
sometimes blue or green, sometimes so reflective it is invisible
and simultaneously opaque: the texture of this world in time and place.
It strikes me this is ground on which to stand…
In spite of the emphasis on provisionality in Brook’s poetry there are moments when the perceiver and the perceived, mind and world seem to cohere, moments of beauty and harmony, even if the ‘concord’ is ‘teetering on the edge of discord’. While some of my characterisations of Brook’s poetry might make him seem like a predominantly rational poet, this is not my intention. The book contains many deeply felt passages and poems, and the poem titled with a quotation from C. K. Williams, ‘Everything waste / everything would be or was’, is among the most moving and poignant poems I can remember reading anywhere. After evocative and brilliant descriptions of a seashore and basin at dusk, it also includes this line on almost-completeness: ‘What if we could hold all this like the sail almost holds the breeze…?’
Brook’s poetry explores and aims to do justice to the complexities of existence. It neither advocates a simple lyricism nor does it oppose feeling and thought as, unfortunately, occasional reviews of Australian poetry still sometimes do. Subtle irony, self-scrutiny, humour and wit are also sprinkled through the collection. I delight in the humour of these lines from earlier in the aforementioned poem: ‘At the water’s edge livid green strands tangle / and flop like snakes writhing in a B-grade / horror movie.’
While it has only been possible for me to touch on a few of the salient features and main themes of this wonderful and expansive book, I would like to at least mention one other poem. In a sequence of historico-political poems there is a long poem with a title-quotation from Joseph Conrad, ‘The brown current / ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness’. This complex and formally innovative poem intertwines an unfolding description of the natural environment of the eastern beaches of Sydney and its brutal history of colonisation with factual synopses and examples of the worst atrocities in human history from ancient times to the present day. Its masterful handling of this difficult material reminds the reader that Brook was a history teacher for twenty years.
I wholeheartedly encourage you to buy, read, re-read, and think about Brook Emery’s new collection have been and are. I am delighted to declare the book launched.
Luke Fischer is a Sydney-based poet and scholar. His books include the poetry collection Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the forthcoming poetry collection A Personal History of Vision (UWAP, 2017). For more information see: www.lukefischerauthor.com
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Only the Animals
by Ceridwen Dovey
Hamish Hamilton
ISBN 9781926428581
Reviewed by JO LANGDON
Ceridwen Dovey’s award-winning Only the Animals is comprised of astonishing interventions and a multiplicity of voices that powerfully re-create and re-focalise narratives of the past. Each of the ten stories is typically recalled, posthumously, by the ‘soul’ of an animal affected—and ultimately killed—by human violence. A camel is shot in colonial Australia to the laughter of Henry Lawson; Colette’s cat finds herself unexpectedly separated from her beloved owner and lost on the Western Front; a freewheeling mussel, voiced a la Jack Kerouac, dies at Pearl Harbor; a tortoise with prior connections to Leo Tolstoy, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and George Orwell perishes at the ‘height’ of the Cold War—very literally, after she is launched into space during the Russian space program. As the authors made note of in this list might suggest, these stories also feature a stellar line-up of literary allusions. The book’s creative bridges, a notable feature of this collection, emphasise the role of intertextuality and revision, attesting to the fundamental role of other texts; to the ‘conversation’ literature and its creative imaginings and (re)presentations of the world compose. Individually and taken together, these stories are impressive feats of playful ‘originality’ rich in voice, dazzling and devastating in scope.
Chronologically ordered, the collection spans the years 1892–2006. The third story, set in Germany, 1917, evokes the ape narrator of Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’. Dovey’s ‘Red Peter’s Little Lady’ centres and builds on—perhaps departs from—the ‘little half-trained female chimpanzee’ afforded only a few clauses or four sentences (depending on the translation) in the penultimate paragraph of Kafka’s narrative. These lines provide the epigraph and ostensibly the impetus for Dovey’s story. In this alternate or counter narrative, the reader is invited to witness the comical and unsettling ways in which Red Peter’s mate to-be, named Hazel in Dovey’s tale, is socialised and taught to ‘perform’ her gendered human identity. Via their epistolary courtship, Hazel reveals to Red Peter: ‘My ears are pierced with metal studs to make me beautiful. I can pull on stockings without laddering them.’ However, the story’s World War I backdrop means that ‘there are no longer any stockings to be had’ (57). Hazel candidly relates:
I am itchy. Itchy, itchy, itchy. Frau Oberndorff won’t let me scratch. She bathes me, combs my hair to make it lie down, cuts my toenails, cleans my tear ducts. She says my breath is a problem. It stinks. I like the stink. I breathe out and sniff it in. . . . I scratch my bum, sniff my fingers. (52)
Hazel continually refers to her own physicality frankly and with little regard for ‘decorum’. As their written courtship progresses, she advises Red Peter: ‘I cannot give you much other than a warm body flexible in the ways you would like it, a certain length of arm, bow legs, a barrel torso.’ She asks: ‘Would you like me to be more human, or less human, or more or less human?’ (60).
The playful, subversive and comic charge of Hazel’s perspective heightens the ultimately tragic nature of her discovery of Red Peter’s feelings for his trainer’s wife, Frau Oberndorff (an affair also revealed through letter writing, Frau Oberndorff being the facilitator of Red Peter and Hazel’s correspondence). Another overt nod to Kafka’s iconic works of fiction is the sign Hazel, betrayed and refusing to eat, instructs Frau Oberndorff to display outside her cage: ‘THE HUNGER ARTIST’ (68).
Elsewhere, human and animal relationship dynamics work to reveal humans’ propensity for hypocrisy. Adolf Hitler and many other Nazi party members famously loved and showed considerable compassion towards their companion animals, as we are reminded in ‘Hundstage’, a story told through the point of view of Heinrich Himmler’s German Shepherd. Indeed, as the lead-in this story’s epigraph from Boria Sax reminds us, ‘Those who are humane towards animals are not necessarily kind to human beings’ (75). The ironic charge of ‘Hundstage’ is considerable; the story emphasises karma, compassion and reincarnation via Himmler’s significant interest in Hinduism. As he listens to the humans around him converse about Hindu figures and beliefs, the dog narrator reports: ‘I already knew who Krishna and Arjuna were; like me, they were vegetarians’ (80). Nonetheless, he struggles to maintain his vegetarianism and good karma when the conversation moves to the slaughter of chickens:
I thought of the few chickens I had managed to kill and eat in my life, before becoming a vegetarian, and felt sick. And hungry. I thought of how good their blood tasted, of how prettily their feathers floated through the air. (79)
Such shifts in thought are realised when the narrator finds himself starving in the woods, having been banished by his master after a purported act of disloyalty. The anguished dog recalls other acts that have disgraced his family:
Grandfather’s lowest moment – an incident that was not recorded in any research notebooks – was being caught behind a bitch of unknown breeding kept in the same facility for canine medication experimentation, whose hair and teeth had fallen out. He felt the burden then of being the ur-type, and swore off females until von Stephanitz guided my beautiful grandmother into his pen. (77)
This account unsettlingly evokes The Nazis’ medical experiments and the groups of humans, deemed lesser, on whom these experiments were conducted. Indeed, non-human perspectives also allow the reader glimpses of human suffering—and too of the patent yet insidious social and ideological divisions of our world: Collette’s cat, Kiki-la-Doucette, befriends a soldier in the trenches and reveals of her new human companion: ‘In the night, my soldier lay beside his friend, hand in hand. I think they are in love but hide it from the other soldiers’ (34). ‘The Bones’, the story focalised through the perspective of the camel, depicts Australia’s frontier wars in tellingly elliptical ways that draw the reader’s attention to suppressed violence and silenced atrocity:
Henry Lawson lowered his voice. Then the medium said, out of nowhere, “Hospital Creek. Do you know of it?” Mitchell’s father’s sunburnt face went pale. “Yes,” he said. “I worked at the stockyard there.” The medium was silent for a long time. “I’m getting – a fire. A fire of some kind.” Mitchell’s father said nothing. “Bodies in a fire,” she said. “A lot of them.” And at this, Mitchell’s father began to shake, a grown man trembling, but not with fear. With rage. “You bitch,” he spat, “don’t you know how to keep your mouth shut like the rest of us?” (7)
Indeed, by drawing our attention to occluded histories and perspectives, Only the Animals also serves as a powerful reminder of the ways in which our world values certain human and non-human lives more than others. In a ‘real world’ and human context, we are reminded of this regularly, and not least of all by our politicians. We might consider, for example, the markedly routine comments of the former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott (also the Minister for Indigenous Affairs) with regards to Aboriginal history and culture [1], or Australia’s asylum seeker policies and the ways in which various political parties and leaders have promised or continued to treat certain groups of people cruelly for political gain, while the Counting Dead Women [2] project is a devastating reminder of the ‘private’, ‘domestic’ and often unspoken nature of certain forms of violence; the ways in which trauma is an accepted part of women’s existence.
Such examples are certainly not to suggest that the experiences of the animals in these stories stand in, metaphorically, for those of humans—or certain groups of humans; that these are anthropocentric projections. Dovey’s animals are utterly themselves—as much as they are self-consciously and self-reflexively works of historical and literary pastiche—as are her human characters, the good, kind, and ugly. The book’s title draws from a quote by Sax: ‘What does it mean to be human? Perhaps only the animals can know.’ Certainly, these narratives provide mirrors that are not always flattering, yet nonetheless unfailingly compassionate. Ultimately, these tender, funny and immersive stories provide a constellation of perspectives both timeless and urgent in their calls for kindness, remembrance, listening and acknowledgement.
Note
[1] 1 In 2014 Abbott reiterated what Amy McQuire describes as ‘the legal fiction of “terra nullius”’, by stating that ‘back in 1788’ Australia ‘was nothing but bush’ (qu. McQuire 2014). Abbott’s comments also include a description of the colonisation of Australia as ‘the defining moment in the history of this continent’ (qu. Dingle 2014), and an assertion that ‘[t]he first lot of Australians were chosen by the finest judges in England’ (“Gillard And Abbott Attend Australia Day Citizenship Ceremonies” 2013)—effectively erasing 60,000 years of Aboriginal history, and the trauma and grief suffered by Aboriginal communities as a result of European imperialism, from the discourse on Australia’s past.
[2] https://www.facebook.com/notes/destroy-the-joint/counting-dead-women-australia-2015-we-count-every-single-death-due-to-violence-a/938000946247650
JO LANGDON tutors in Literary Studies and Professional & Creative Writing in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Geelong. She is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Snowline (2012), which was co-winner of the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. Her recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Westerly, Powder Keg and Overland.
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
One Hundred Letters Home
by Adam Aitken
Vagabond Press
ISBN 978-1-922181-04-6
Reviewed by REBECCA ALLEN
“Doctor, Where is the healing in writing? Is it simply re-telling the past, or are we re-making it? Is it a story that becomes a promise – a redeeming moment?”
In his memoir A Hundred Letters Home, Adam Aitken looks back into his family’s past, and specifically, that of his enigmatic parents. Today a poet and academic, Aitken was born in London in the 1960s to an Anglo-Australian father and a Thai mother. His early childhood was spent in South-East Asia before the family moved to Sydney in 1968 where his parents later separated. Aitken examines their complex relationship and probes his own sense of cultural and filial ties, using life writing as a means to grapple with his distinct cultural hybridity.
The text itself is hybrid, drawing on family photographs, his father’s letters and conversations with his parents and doctor. It includes some of Aitken’s poems as well as other intertextual references, and gaps are filled with recounted memories and speculation. The memoir jumps between multiple timelines, retelling Aitken’s trip to Thailand as a young man in the early 80s, reaching back to 1950s Bangkok, when his hard-working, hard-partying ad-man father fell in love with his mother, then forward to the separation of his parents and back again to his early childhood in South-East Asia. What seems at first a fragmented, non-linear text gradually develops, as anecdotes overlap and chronologies intersect, into an intricate, richly layered narrative.
Drawing the memoir together is a persistent vacillation between feelings of closeness and distance, of connection and estrangement. This tension is particularly striking in the representation of Aitken’s relationship with his father. His ambiguous attitude towards the man who was so often absent during his childhood shapes the way Aitken relates to the rest of his family, his Thai heritage and ultimately how he views and judges himself.
Aitken remembers with bitterness the interminable summer he spent with his mother and brother in Perth, “like refugees in a detention camp”, while his father arranged a house on the other side of the continent in Sydney. As Aitken becomes aware of his difference for the first time, (to the school bullies “We were ‘Ching-chong Chinamen conceived in a pot’”), his father becomes more and more of a “stranger to us, a man who embodied Australia itself but who was not around to affirm it.” The gulf between them only widens when the family move to Sydney: his father misses sailing lessons and music practice, too caught up with his bohemian friends, left-wing parties and success as an advertising executive. He transforms into something abstract, made concrete only by Aitken’s habit of collecting symbolic tokens, (golf balls, a cigarette lighter, his fountain pen), replacing “a real father with images.” Even today an oppressive “Web of Silence” remains between them. True feelings are only communicated through the most cryptic of clues, his father preferring to hold forth on his latest obsession – “kitchen taps and Sabatier knives” – rather than discuss his depression: “After years of silence (the watching-TV-after-a-hard-day-at-the-office silence) I have become irritated that now he makes me the compulsory listener”.
Aitken even admits he became “willing to believe my father hadn’t been my real father.” After finding a photograph of his mother as a young woman with another man, Aitken almost convinces himself that Robert, a handsome Swiss his mother had met in the ‘50s while his father was posted in Hong Kong, is in fact his biological father: “My father always said I looked just like my mother, but I like to think I have Robert’s looks.” He wonders if Robert could “have been the better father, the one I never had… In my dreams, I imagine myself the child of this man: an adventurer, someone rich, a man I knew nothing about”. In recurring scenes, Aitken uses this photograph as “archival evidence” to obsessively quiz his mother about her past. However he soon discovers she won’t easily cooperate, refusing to remember certain details and purposely misremembering others, claiming “‘He was a travel agent, that’s who he was.’ Then she changes her story and he becomes a banker.” Though she dismisses the idea of an affair, “‘Not really my type’”, Aitken later discovers that letters from Robert continued to arrive, including one with a photograph of the pair of them dressed casually, sitting close and laughing – captured in the moment of a punch-line or funny memory, his mother looking positively “alive again”.
As much as Aitken attempts to reject his father – even replace him – his thwarted attempts to uncover more of his mother’s past in fact parallel is father’s own experience. She keeps both husband and son at an emotional distance with her expertly conjured “smokescreens” and her impassive “Buddha mask” face. We catch glimpses of her personal narrative throughout the memoir – her origins in a small border town and her university career, her jobs as a forklift driver and police interpreter in Sydney, her life in Cairns after the divorce – but not enough to gain a sense of her true subjectivity. (A level of emotional bias on Aitken’s part is clearly at play here, as her obscuration leads the reader towards an objectified view of her, perhaps not far from the problematic stereotype of the Asian seductress.)
Examining the photographs his father took of his mother in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Aitken symbolically steps into his shoes, viewing his parents’ relationship through his father’s camera lens and thus his eyes. He concludes his father found her similarly inscrutable during their marriage. In the early photographs, his mother appears joyous and carefree, encapsulating the initial excitement of their courtship in Bangkok with her hair “long, untied, and cascad[ing] down her back”, “sometimes striking an erotically glamorous pose, straddling a veranda balustrade”. The contrast with the photographs taken after their marriage in London is apparent: the passion has waned and the light-hearted laughter is replaced by a reserve masquerading as sophistication. These London photographs are certainly aesthetically appealing – carefully composed, beautifully shot – and yet there is no sense of connection between cameraman and subject, husband and wife. In one, Aitken’s mother stands smoking on a street corner, looking resolutely away: “though my father is probably taking a series of photos, she’s not there in essence or spirit. She’s flown.” The reality of his mother’s aloofness manifests itself in these photographs, as Aitken sadly sees that “every photo my father took of my mother was insufficient to redeem the living self of her soul, that essence he craved so much, and of which she denied him possession.”
This distance both father and son feel from the mother is mirrored on a larger scale by their shared disconnection from Thai culture. Although Aitken’s trip to Bangkok in his early twenties is intended as a “project in identity reversal”, an attempt to “excrete every last bit of Australia out of [my] system” – and by extension, every last bit of his father – he ultimately realises he cannot shed the feeling of the outsider, the farang. Despite the warm welcome of his mother’s relatives, despite the new hair cut they insist upon, their efforts to teach him Thai and their encouragement to find a Thai girlfriend, something intangible eludes him: “Everything you have imagined to be the truth of your origins begins to seem like an illusion… Something is always secret, and you know, so deeply, when it’s time to leave.” The chapter is appropriately titled “(Un)becoming Thai”, as Aitken’s stay with his relatives is, in effect, his father’s “return to them through me. I reminded my relatives of the man they last met in 1958, the man I never thought I had come to resemble or invoke in others. At that moment of their recognition of him in me, I felt a surge of love for him, a connection.” His experience in Thailand parallels that of his father, as “together, Father and Son, you and I, dream of that pure understanding”; the desire to be part of a culture which will be forever unfathomable. This blurring between father and son is encapsulated in an earlier, deeply emotive poem evocative of an old sepia photograph. It describes two outsiders separated from the world yet sharing a view through time:
I am standing alone in the northeast monsoon
[…]
tea-dipped clouds
smog sunset.
Your view perhaps, in ’56,
above the throng
All your past, my past
lost in letters.
As a reader, we have the impression Aitken is at times reluctant to accept this connection with his father. When he comments “‘Son, you’re becoming so much like me in your old age’”, Aitken adds bitterly, “There you go – everything refers back to him (he believes this book is all about him).’” However, the process of life writing, of revising their shared pasts, clearly highlights the unexpected truth that Aitken is, after all, much closer than he expected to his father. Despite the failures of family, Aitken ultimately accepts that his father is in fact “some other version of myself”.
REBECCA ALLEN completed her Honours degree in French language and literature while also editing Hermes, the University of Sydney Student Union’s literary journal. She has volunteered for Contrappasso Magazine, a journal for international writing, and has interned as part of Mascara’s prose fiction editorial team. She works at Penguin Random House Australia and is a regular review contributor for Mascara.
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Finding Eliza
by Larissa Behrendt
St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press
ISBN 978-0-702253-90-4
Reviewed by NADIA RHOOK
“She took a long great breath, lifted her petticoats, and ran headlong into the greatest adventure ever told!”[i]
– The Rollicking Adventures of Eliza Fraser, film poster, 1975
Larissa Behrendt’s latest work is a profound lesson for the gullible. Finding Eliza calls out narrative tricks that have been deployed with colonizing affect by white writers, artists, and legal authorities, not least dramatically those about cannibalism.
Drawing on her background in law and fiction, Behrendt guides the reader deep into the unsettling pathos of colonial fantasies and myth-making in Australia. The story of Eliza Frazer – a white woman who was shipwrecked in 1836, and then spent several weeks with the Butchalla people on Flinders Island off northeast Australia – provides an entrée for Behrendt’s core argument. Narratives colonize. Eliza’s alleged capture by cannibals enthralled 19th Century audiences, and functioned to reinforce stereotypes of Aboriginal people as ‘barbarous’ and therefore in need of white civilization.
As Behrendt admits, she’s by no means the first writer to enter the murky territory of the ‘actual’ and ‘fantastical’ accounts of cannibalism. Names as big as Sigmund Freud have made comment on the perversions embedded in European’s cannibal stories. Published, too, 15 years after Tracey Banivanua Mar’s interrogation of cannibal tropes of Pacific history, the imperatives behind the book remain pressing.[ii] It’s not only the enduring repetition of narratives about ‘native’ cannibalism that are of concern, but the material forces behind them. For, Behrendt reminds us, white writers continue to profit from narratives where they imagine Aboriginal people as objects of knowledge.
In each chapter, Behrendt offers her readers subtly different angles to view and reflect on the colonizing operation of stories. From Eliza’s stories about Butchalla cannibalism, she turns to the enduring popularity of cannibal stories in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and later, to the story of Elizabeth Durack, a white woman who, in the 1990s, fraudulently pretended to paint as an Aboriginal man, ‘Eddie Burrup’. Through these narratives, Behrendt exposes the ways in which blurring the line between fact and fiction has assisted white men and women to indorse their power and feign innocence, and make a buck (or many) along the way.
The opening chapters are a productive dialect between 19th Century historical narratives and critique thereof, all wrapped in cogent prose. As I entered the world of flesh-eating fantasies, I felt a swelling curiosity about why Behrendt was drawn to unpick narratives about Eliza Fraser; an historical character I found unarresting, if not annoying. (Admittedly, this may be because Eliza ‘mirrors’ an uncomfortable reflection of my own white woman-ness, to use Behrendt’s term.) But this book is not really about Eliza, or her likability. There’s more at stake in this interplay between narrative and its deconstruction. Something at once political and personal.
When Behrendt was in high school in Sydney she was nicknamed ‘Coonardoo’. It wasn’t until she fell on the 1928 published novel of the same name that she realised what this entailed. In Coonardoo the main character, an Aboriginal woman also called Coonardoo, is drawn into working for a white family. The book constructs Coonardo as lazy and, most violently, her death represents ‘the inevitable destruction of her country’.[iii]
For Behrendt, reading Coonardo hurt. As Kyungmi Shi has suggested in her work ‘On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary’: ‘Race enters writing … as a structure of feeling, as something that structures feelings, that lays down tracks of affection and repulsion, rage and hurt, desire and ache.’[iv] And other examples Behrendt draws on also illustrate how narratives create, and are created by, the feelings of readers on both sides of the non/Indigenous divide. At a number of points in the book, I wanted Behrendt to prod the affective work of the narratives further. In the introduction she evokes how stories take a ‘hold on our hearts’, but if narratives structure emotions then surely stories have a role to play in de-colonizing emotions. Is this a matter of avoiding white-centric narratives altogether? Or, is it more to do with finding a storyline that unsettles established colonial tropes? In her approval of Liam Davison’s ‘post-colonial’ fiction White Woman, which confronts the dark, patriarchal history of the Gippsland frontier, Behrendt seems to suggest the latter.[v]
Given the book’s persistent critique of colonial narratives, it’s not entirely clear whose hearts and thoughts Behrendt hopes it will remould. Despite the contemporary resonances of the figure of Eliza Fraser, and of the ‘classic Aussie’ 1976 film named after her, I’m not sure the book will attract readers who aren’t already invested in critiquing colonialism. Yet it’s the book’s model of vigilance that makes it so instructive, a valuable resource for thinkers, writers, lawyers, anthropologists, historians, and students. This is a book to reflect on, keep, and return to. It guides readers to realise the interconnectedness of history, law, literature, art, stories and colonial power.
Behrendt doesn’t stop at taking her reader behind white narratives. She also travels beyond them. By drawing on a rare oral history account of Eliza, Behrendt exposes the gap between white and Butchalla-made narratives about Eliza. She tells how an Aboriginal Elder, Olga Miller, has narrated that when Eliza met the Butchalla ‘the women had marked the stranger with with ochre signs which read “let this woman through”.’ Miller’s story turned white narratives upside down. ‘Far from being the danger to Eliza’, Behrendt observes, ‘the Butchalla women were responsible for her safety.’[vi]
Toward the end of the book, Behrendt drives home the ‘so what?’ of her argument for the need to call out the colonizing potential of storytelling. In 1993, she tells, the Yorta Yorta people became the first people to lodge a Native Title claim. Justice Olney of the Supreme Court denied their claim, asserting the Yorta Yorta were ‘no longer a traditional culture’. Then, in early 2004, a Yorta Yorta spokesperson, Henry Atkinson, asserted a counter narrative; ‘All societies evolve, some through their own progression and others because they are forced to.’ In April that year, the state invited the Yorta Yorta to enter a co-operative management agreement as a means to ‘involve’ the Yorta Yorta in the management of their own land.[vii] What legal matter are stories? Behrendt’s message on this is piercing, and delivered, like all the book’s messages, through a revealing example. ‘Law is a national story’, and through story-telling, Olney and others have supported the duress of white claims over Indigenous lands.
It would be difficult to overestimate the gravity of Finding Eliza’s lessons. Readers should take a long breath before they confront the strands of colonial power that have a binding grip on white psyches, and touch the structural corners of the settler nation that is Australia; invasion, violence, cultural appropriation, and land rights, no less.
Notes
[i] ‘The Rollicking Adventures of Eliza Fraser’, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074466/, accessed 5 May 2016.
[ii]Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Cannibalism and Colonialism: charting colonies and frontiers in nineteenth century Fiji’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2010, Vol.52(2), 255-281; See also Ian J McNiven, Lynette Russell and Kay Schaffer, Constructions of colonialism : perspectives on Eliza Fraser’s shipwreck, Washington, D.C : Leicester University Press, 1998.
[iii] Larissa Behrendt, Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling, St.Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2016, 93
[iv] ‘Where Writers Go Wrong in Imagining the Lives of Others’, adapted from the foreword of Kyungmi Shin, The Racial Imaginary, 2003; http://lithub.com/on-whiteness-and-the-racial-imaginary/
[v] Behrendt, Finding Eliza, 99.
[vi] Ibid., 53.
[vii] ‘Case Summary: Yorta Yorta v Victoria’, August 2005, http://aiatsis.gov.au/publications/products/case-summary-yorta-yorta-v-victoria, accessed 1 May 2016.
NADIA RHOOK is a Melbourne-based historian and writer, published in Postcolonial Studies, the Journal of Women’s History and Peril: Asian Australian Arts and Culture Magazine. She’s currently curating a City Library heritage exhibition, ‘Moving Tongues: language and difference in 1890s Melbourne’.
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Queen’s Play
by Aashish Kaul
Roundfire Books
ISBN 978-1-78279-861-3
Reviewed by SUBHASH JAIRETH
Queen Mandodari’s Clever Play
Once upon a time in a kingdom on a little island lived a queen by the name of Mandodari (the ‘soft-bellied’). The king was busy fighting wars and so bored, or perhaps to challenge her husband’s authority, she invented a new board game. No, the game wasn’t new but a modification of Chaturanga, a board game popular in ancient India. The changes the queen introduced turned the game into something similar to what we now know as chess.
This imagined invention of chess by Mandodari, the wife of King Ravana, one of the ultimate prototypes of evil in the Indian epic Ramayana, is at the centre of Aashish Kaul’s intriguing novel. The dare of this conceit played upon us by the author is as breathtaking as the act of disruption the queen herself crafts. The epic’s narrative fabric of stories within stories is sliced open to retrieve a little string from which a clever writer like Kaul can weave his own stories.
“The need for tales they say arose, when the fetters came stuck round our ankles with a clank of inevitability, when our wings were torn slowly the earth’s fierce pull, when even the skill of climbing trees or perching on a branch was forgotten. And yet the longing remained.” These are the words with which Kaul begins his story. Like most writers, a longing to explain the urge to tell stories also drives Kaul’s project. A writer self-conscious of his own design and intent, Kaul is ultimately aware of the limitations all stories, including epics, are burdened with. Limitations announced emphatically in the final pages of the book by one of the narrators: “Thus it occurred to you that not even of your story were you the hero. Privilege and history overran you there as well.” Desire to make and tell stories drive us because it is meant to remain unconsummated. The satisfaction that comes our way is not only transient but also illusory.
In a way, the longing that takes hold of Mandodari forcing her to transform the board game is quite similar to the longing most writers feel. The board game Mandodari invents is not merely a game but also a symbolic space within which new stories can be imagined and told by playing the game. In fact playing of the game, moving this or that piece, and imagining and calculating consequences of the moves aren’t different from the way writers make their stories. Thus, the board game, the origin of which Kaul wants to imagine, turns into a trope of story-telling itself.
Mandodari introduces two vital modifications to the game of Chaturanga: discarding the rolling of dice, and introducing the figure of queen as a piece on the board. Once the dice is removed the role of chance in the game and that of fate in life are challenged. One can now become a master of one’s own destiny. Freedom to exercise one’s will and act is there to enjoy. Suddenly Mandodari begins to remind me of a modernist informed by the traditions of European Enlightenment. “Why was the dice abandoned?” Asks the narrator in the novel. “For one reason alone. That fate ruled the board as it ruled us,” he explains soon after.
But Mandodari isn’t merely a modernist. In her I also spot traces of a latent proto-feminist. In the game invented by her, the most powerful piece on the board is the figure of the queen. All power resides with it. It can move freely in all directions. The power of the figure of the king, on the other hand, is drastically curtailed. The moves it is allowed are minor, restricted and almost ritualistic. His fate is nothing but to turn into a mere symbol of victory or defeat. Kaul’s Mandodari is clever. The ‘soft-bellied’ queen has guts.
Most of the story in the novel is told in the third-person voice of an omniscient narrator. His power is occasionally disrupted by two narrators who prefer to talk in first person. One of them is most probably Hanuman, commonly known to readers familiar with the epic Ramayana as the monkey-god. The identity of the other narrators remains illusive. He appears and disappears as if he were a piece on Mandodari’s board game. Narrative time also shifts from past to present without any warning. I found these changes abrupt and unsettling. But the irritation was soon assuaged by luminous prose, its rhythmic movement and its poetic cadences. There are many passages that lingered in my mind. Here is one: “During the day, sparrows the size of a child’s fist with indigo and blue patterned crowns and sword-like erect tails, flitted in the hedgerows enclosing the yard, splashing colour everywhere, and in the evening, before the pine torches had pushed the darkness further into itself, a martin returning to a nearby tree would sometimes brush its open wings against my cheek.”
The book begins with a note from the author. “Among many things that this book is,” it says, “that every book is, it is a book about chess. Not chess as we know it, but chess as was known at the time in which the story is based.” I deliberately ignored the note and read it after I had read the book and felt cheated by it. A book, at the centre of which is a daring move to get rid of the power the rolling of dice played in Chaturanga and thereby granting freedom to think, feel and move, doesn’t need the imposition of a note that tells its readers what should be read in it. The story is wonderful, told masterfully by a writer who knows his craft well. I don’t want to believe that the note, in some way, reflects the author’s doubt that without this clarification the story would fail to do the job it has been asked to. Why such doubt, such indecision?
This is Kaul’s second book. His first, A Dream of Horses and Other Stories (2014) is recommended by J.M. Coetzee who notes that “… dreamlike setting, the fastidious melancholy sensibility of their no-longer–young narrators, lead us directly into the territory of late modernism of Borges and Beckett and Nabokov.” A very high praise form a Nobel Laureate, reproduced deservedly on the back cover of The Queen’s Play.
Once the game is invented Mandodari invites the king to play and they play more than once. Often the queen wins but she is clever to let the king enjoy a win too. The game is followed by sex. It has to. It is often said that good description of sex scenes demands utmost control. Unfortunately the writing begins to fail and loose control in these passages some of which can easily place the book on the short list for the Bad Sex in Fiction award. Here is one: “At last the vulva surrounds the phallus, engulfs it. Like dark space engulfing matter, like a lake possessing a mountain’s image, like night covering the gloss of the world. Like a wedge his torso locks into her wet angular thighs.”
“Well, less is more Lucrezia,” reminds Robert Browning’s faultless painter. Fortunately Kaul does his best to follow the rule. The language, apart from the passage cited above, is precise and use of metaphors are disciplined and efficient. They add to the tonal quality of the narrative asking to be read and heard aloud.
I read the book twice and I am sure I’ll read it again to enjoy the resonant prose. The book is meant to be reread. Not because the prose is opaque and the plot complicated. No, it isn’t a plot-driven book. The book demands slow reading to appreciate its carefully crafted prose and to think about the ideas it explores deftly. I hope that this book is able to find the empathetic reader it has been written for.
SUBHASH JAIRETH was born in India. He spent nine years in Moscow and moved to Canberra in 1986. He has published poetry, fiction and nonfiction in Hindi, Russian and English. His book To Silence: Three Autobiographies was published in 2011. Two plays adapted from the book were performed at Canberra’s Street Theatre in 2012. His novel After Love was released last year.
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Intervention: An Anthology
by Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss (eds)
Concerned Australians/New South Books
ISBN 978-0-646937-09-0
Reviewed by KATE HALL
In The Intervention: An Anthology (2015), editors Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss add their voices to a diverse and impressive range of writers and speakers, from renowned Northern Territory Elders like Rosalie Kunoth-Monks of Utopia and Rev Dr Djiniyini Gondarra of Galiwin’ku to literary heavy-weights like Alexis Wright and Bruce Pascoe. This is an important book, and the calibre of its contributors is only part of what makes it essential reading. As Scott explains in her launch speech, and in the acknowledgements, ‘This book has had a unique provenance. Being unable to find a publisher became a positive factor once the tide of support from the community and individuals [. . .] rolled in’ (261). The anthology was published through the combined efforts of social justice advocates Concerned Australians, crowd-funding and individual donations, and so it is a resource made possible by those whose opposition to the injustices of the NT Intervention has translated into concrete support for the anthology. This is heartening news for a country whose successive governments seem to care so little about the rights of its first peoples. As Larissa Behrendt notes in her contribution, ‘the intervention in the Northern Territory is a textbook example of why government policies continue to fail Aboriginal people’ (67), and the contributions The Intervention: An Anthology explain, in various ways, some of the reasons for this failure, while the book itself is a symbol of community support.
The Intervention: An Anthology contains several reports, essays and transcripts of speeches that document the NTER, and these are important forms of historical witnessing, from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. But this anthology gives equal weight to writing as truth-telling that doesn’t require footnotes, and the anthology also contains a wealth of such responses. Poetry from Sam Wagan Watson and Ali Cobby Eckermann sits alongside short stories from Debra Adelaide and P.M. Newton. There are several first-hand accounts of life lived during the Intervention, by what the fiction and life-writing pieces share with the essays and reports is a unifying tone comprised of outrage, pain, anger and despair, as well as solidarity and a commitment to social justice and the pursuit of human rights. What sets the life-writing contributions apart is the way they function simultaneously as protest statements, trauma narratives and testimonials; and many of the most powerful pieces of life-writing in the anthology come from people who are not well known as writers. Some of the life-writing in the collection is transcribed from recorded speeches and so the act of writing itself morphs into the act of recording; spoken into written testimony. The personal recollections of what it feels like have to pay for groceries with a basics card, or to be terrified when the inexplicable arrival of army and federal police troops evokes the intergenerational trauma of the child removal are powerful, affecting acts of testimony.
There is a call for immediate action evident in all of the statements, stories, personal essays, and works of creative non-fiction in the anthology, and the collection reminds readers that, like other human rights disasters in this country, there’s no belatedness about the intervention. It is not consigned to history, not finished, and not yet dealt with. As Heiss points out, ‘no Australian today can claim “not to know” what is happening in the Northern Territory’ (13). For those who might not know enough, the anthology should serve as a useful primer, as well as a scholarly resource for students and academics. The collection provides a number of factual accounts that offer insights into the intervention from its inception, such as Pat Anderson’s ‘The Intervention: Personal Reflections’, in which Anderson, as the co-author (with Rex Wild) of the Little Children are Sacred report describes the conflicting responses of Aboriginal people to the initial implementation of the intervention’s policies:
The Intervention presented a real dilemma for Aboriginal people, at the local community level as well as at the national level. For some, this was a long overdue recognition of the continuing disadvantage of Aboriginal communities and the need to act decisively to end it. On the other hand, there were those who opposed the Intervention for its attack on rights that had been hard won by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians over many years. (37)
The intervention is the term commonly used to describe both the initial thrust of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), in which a slew of new policies were imposed in a matter of days across seventy three remote communities, and the continuing impact of these policies up until July 2012. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act, to use the intervention’s official title, ended in name only at that time, but the paternalistic and racist policies continued under the banner of Labour’s Stronger Futures Act and remain in place today. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the NTER, which John Howard launched in response to Wild and Anderson’s Little Children are Sacred report, did not take up any of the recommendations in that report, and imposed a series of other initiatives not recommended in the report. Crucially, the NTER did not follow the first recommendation in that report, that governments ‘commit to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities.’ (197)
Instead, as several commentators in the anthology point out, the Howard Government sent in the army and federal police to enforce a series of blatantly racist policies, some of which required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act. These included quarantining of welfare payments, restrictions on alcohol and pornography, compulsory so called heath checks for children to check for signs of sexual abuse, the compulsory acquisition of land through long leases, the removal of permit systems and the exclusion of consideration of customary law in sentencing. Rosalie Kunoth Monks describes the fear and bewilderment when the army arrived in her community:
My recollection of the Intervention in my home community Urapuntja, commonly known as Utopia, was the day the soldiers in uniform, the police and public servants arrived and we were ushered up to the basketball stadium and we were all told that we were now under the Intervention. (15)
Opponents of the intervention do not deny the existence of child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities, though the intervention failed to produce evidence of this during its so-called emergency response. But, as Jeff McMullen points out in his essay, the sexual abuse of children is wide-spread in this country and not limited to Aboriginal communities. The point to be made, of course, is that ‘no one ordered NT-style interventions into the church and state institutions, or into the barbed-wire detention camps where the children of asylum seekers had been locked up for years.’ (121) Jaowyn Elder Rachel Willika also points out the hypocrisy, the racism and the blindness that fueled the focus on Aboriginal people during the NTER: ‘I have been thinking about those words: little children are sacred. Who are the little children? Are they talking about all the children? Black children and white children? That’s what it says to me. We should be protecting all the children. Aren’t white children sacred too?’
In her 2015 speech commending the anthology, Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs acknowledges,
of course Little Children are Sacred and, of course, we must do what we can as a nation to stop their neglect and abuse. But we should do so consistently with human rights. To juxtapose human rights versus child protection is a false binary. Australia can both protect our vulnerable children and respect the fundamental rights of our first nations peoples to dignity and meaningful consultation and consent to laws that affect their lives.
The contributors to the anthology are in agreement about the need for change, but in a manner that is consultative and which respects Aboriginal people and cultures. In her contribution to the anthology, ‘what I heard about the intervention’, Melissa Lucashenko quotes Alexis Wright: ‘Yes. Yes, of course the government should do something about the living conditions and the violence. But not this . . .’ (111)
Notes
The Intervention: An Anthology has, since the writing of this review, been acquired by New South Books (forthcoming in July 2016).
Citations
Triggs, G (2015) ‘Northern Territory Intervention 2007’, Transcript, Australian Human Rights Commission, viewed 14/4/16 https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/northern-territory-intervention-2007
KATE HALL lectures in Literary Studies at Deakin University Geelong. She writes fiction and non-fiction, with recent work appearing in Overland, New Community and Pure Slush (forthcoming in 2016).
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Letter to Pessoa
by Michelle Cahill
ISBN 978-1-925336-14-6
Giramondo
Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET
Letter to Pessoa fuses prose, poetry, and literary criticism, and is a hymn to the Republic of Letters. Michelle Cahill’s stories are set in multiple locations: Kenya where she was born; London and Australia where she grew up and now lives, respectively; India which is her family’s country of origin; but also Europe, Latin America, and the USA. As a writer, reader, and fellow traveler, she revisits through the power of fiction the literary canon and authors such as Lorca, Borges, Woolf, or Derrida. Like the South Asian-American character Gogol, in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Cahill’s description as Indian-Australian as referenced on the Giramondo book cover, seems to be a misnomer. The sophistication of the collection’s display of a painting by Madeleine Kelly entitled Treatment for Hysteria is unusual of self-proclaimed Asian Australian literary works, whose cover often betrays the cultural provenance of their author by assimilating the latter to an archetypal Orient. Cahill uses the unmarkedness of the Western referent to develop universal themes linking hysteria (from Greek hustera meaning ‘womb’) to femininity, artistic creativity, and the pleasures of Eros.
Many stories in this collection deal with the subject of erotic relationships, although they are not all pleasurable. Inspired by the teachings of Buddhism, Cahill shows lust to be the cause of much of our suffering as human beings, drawn as it is by an illusory desire for completion. Yet at the same time, this is an illusion worth falling for and pursuing, like writing and reading. Lovers’ words and word lovers are treacherous, as Sartre realised when he published Les Mots, and as his complicated relationship with De Beauvoir attested. In post-structuralist fashion, for Cahill’s characters commitments of various kinds (religious, philosophical, political, amorous, humanitarian, filial or otherwise) are always-already fragmentary, postponed, and proxy-like, if only because of the self-referential, relative, and contingent nature of our identities. The part of self-control or randomness in the detours, distractions, and choices we face both as conscientious and conscious agents leave us stranded, exhausted, even suicidal. With an existentialist nausea, tempered by the difficulties of the writing life, Cahill’s characters long for spiritual detachment and freedom while remaining faithful to their elusive quest for meaning, as in ‘Letter to Tadeusz Rózewicz’: ‘Is it unassailable as death then, this fate of being a slave to signification? And who determines it? How did this happen? I am shattered and vaguely nauseous.’ (230)
Uncertainty is true of the human condition in general but is characteristic of the writing process in particular. Repetitions, draftings, effacements, are part and parcel of a ‘medium — language—’ which, unlike other forms of artistic expression such as painting or music, intrinsically involves precision of meaning.’ (Haskell) This is one reason, I believe, why Cahill used the letter form in her collection. Her fetishistic epistles to various totemic figures of the writing scene — Nabokov, Hemingway, Genet, Conrad, and many others — interpellate the reader with a directness that is as intimate as it is disquieting, for it inscribes the insignias of difference, absence, and death in the very place of the addressee. In some passages, Cahill lays bare the fallacy of first/third-person narratives, for ‘accordingly, this author, this narrator, this third person, is other than me entirely.’ (Cahill 40) One always writes for an idealised Cause or Other, if only for one’s projected, fictional selves, in the manner of ‘internal monologues.’ (Cahill, 60) Through the dreaming of reality, the origin, sex, or trace of an author’s haunting presence within the text matters little. With Barthesean sensibility, Cahill thoroughly deconstructs the artificial distinction between author and narrator/narration, since epistolary exchange always-already involves a double address, to the Self as to the Other; writing under erasure, thus.
Cahill’s collection further posits the impossibility of the presence of the body in writing, other than as an object of fantasy which must be distinct from its author. The body has its own logic, will, and language that cannot be captured in words, unless as prosody. Language’s failure to enshrine presence is where poetry starts: ‘Language is fundamentally abstract (unlike movement, colour and line) but literature uses the rhythms, sound patterns and textures of language to overcome that abstractness and capture something of the sensory qualities of experience.’ (Haskell) We can speak of the material and visual resonances that certain choices of words and assemblages Cahill’s aesthetics will not fail to elicit on the reader. Some metronomic cadence or ‘meretricious rhyme’ (60), such as the ‘automatic’ (Cahill 20) nature of physical pleasure or the ‘mechanical’ (21) to and fro of heart valves heard reverberating inside the head on sleepless, feverish, lonely nights, prove to be a source of pain while other, more soothingly ‘joyful repetitions’ (34) are found in the ostinato of a tenor saxophone (33) or in ‘tabla rhythms.’ (91)
For Cahill, writing, too, can be both a painstaking and indispensable activity. At times, her personas write to be loved or to be heard (‘words are all we have — they speak to us and we echo back’ (61). At others it is either the deeply ethical nature or the amoralism of writing; the way writers are ‘smugglers of the imagination,’ (232) which petty criminals such as the drug dealer in ‘Letter to Jean Genet’ find attractive. Most of the time, though, writing consists in a form of hallucinated daydream in which the Self is allowed temporary escape from pressing commitments (professional, marital, motherly or otherwise) as well as from the humdrum and agitation of modern city life, as in Cahill’s story ‘The Lucid Krishna.’ Her literary creations seem like playful recreations, as in ‘Letter to John Cotetzee.’ Melanie Isaacs, the marginal, silenced woman of colour and university professor David Lurie’s illicit, secret student lover in Coetzee’s Disgrace is given the possibility of a ‘write back’ in the manner of Susan Barton’s letters in Foe, Coetzee’s adaptation of Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe. Can we see in Melanie an avatar of Cahill’s own multiple personifications? Who is this voyeuristic eye/I addressing us as readers from the footnotes of history? As Cahill argues in the author’s note, ‘The letter form…creates a double address and a double narrative between two subjects, reader and author. In this way it can question the status of identities.’
Following Cahill, equally questionable is the status of the literary critic or ‘re-viewer’ as a cover-up for the belated gap which writing as immanence irreducibly inscribes. The commanding ‘you’ form may seek to destroy the illusion of the critic as an objective intermediary or neutral arbiter between author and reader. The letter form, besides, encourages such an intersubjective intimacy while at the same time situating the object of criticism in a slippery realm which, as soon we seek to grasp it, evades us. This is a similar ‘skittishness’ (Cahill 240) which Cahill’s characters, as outsiders, feel — their outsider status not always the product of actual marginalia (in fact, quite a few of them come from a privileged, middle-class background) as it is the manifest expression of an inner struggle for authenticity. As the ‘spirit’ of Cahill writes in her last envoi in ‘A Miko Coda’: ‘If you are passing through me for the first time please enjoy my characters, disguises, sabotages and micro-prose.’ (241-2)
As a reader I appreciate the sincerity, the insecurity, and subtlety of Cahill’s hypertextual montages, Purloined Letters, and Post Cards. I would like to address Cahill just as she addresses me ‘as subject, as author of my own desires, anxieties and caprices.’ (56) It was Derrida, without whom Cahill’s narrator is ‘powerless’ (41), who once declared or wrote that he’d never considered himself to be a philosopher or a critic but rather a careful and patient (re)reader; likewise, that deconstruction is not a school or theory but a methodology and practice. I remember Derrida also retorting in a YouTube video that he wasn’t interested in l’amour (love); or did the interviewer mean la mort (death)? La petite mort is a metaphor for orgasm, which in French translates into jouissance, another word for bliss. Cahill is aware of both the magnitudinal intricacies of language’s future anteriority, (as in ‘Borges and I,’ the story of a resuscitated scientist), and of the rejuvenating potential of love, as of death.
In this age of digital and smartphone romance, amateurish stardom, pathological narcissism, and the proliferation of empty signifiers in the form of social medias such as Twitter or Facebook, the lead story ‘Duende,’ which won the 2014 Hilary Mantel International Short Story Award, struck a chord with me. This has eventually little to do with its tragic ending, I believe. Rather, it must be the character Julio’s antiquated yet genuine understanding on seeing the killing of a bull at a corrida in Seville, of the practice of art and poetry in particular as akin to what Artaud called a Theatre of Cruelty: ‘There’s a café by the river bank in Arenal where he orders wine and starts to write. For the first time in months the poems bleed. They spill from his pen to the paper almost monotonously.’ (Cahill 51) As his soon-to-be ex-boyfriend Miguel also feels, ‘There’s a mutilation to art which can’t be named.’ (Cahill 53)
Writing involves sacrifices. This, Hemingway understood, as Cahill does. I do not have in mind the refugee crisis in ‘Sleep Has No Home’ or the Christmas Island disaster which she exposes so tragically in ‘A Wall of Water.’ As its title suggests, these are distant nightmares, although they ought not to be. Neither do I allude to her tackling of the subject of libidinous desire in ‘To Show A Little Hustle’ or ‘Chasing Nabokov.’ These are necessary engagements, especially in the field of self-identified Asian Australian women’s writing where the erotic often remains a non-issue or a commodity, and Cahill addresses them with elegance, insight and cleverness.
What I mean instead are the ‘tortured souls’ in ‘Letter to Tadeusz Rózewicz’ (Cahill 224) and the ‘apocryphal realms’ of ‘Borges and I’ (133) which, following historical precedents and political oppressions, may be invented by the minority writer for their own sanity, stranded as they are in a hostile material reality, with personal failures and industry hurdles to the letters being issued. There is an irony in this. Cahill knows perfectly well that her letters might remain forever unanswered; that they must stop somewhere, at some point, for ‘the book to find its destination’ (236) into the collective mainstream of a readers’ consciousness; though that may never be, for a book’s message, particularly as a short story collection, is bound to be fragmented, like two lovers parting or like a divorced couple. And yet it is the aesthetic of the fragment that most concerns the minority writer. Cahill’s anguish in ‘Letter to Tadeusz Rózewicz’ to unburden herself from the writing process, to be free of writing, makes of the text, a reader, interpreting the figurative voices, compiling all the fragments: ‘I am not the writer, it is Mochizuki that I see.’ she plangently confesses in ‘A Miko Coda.” (Cahill 240)
There is an intentional ambivalence to this text-author, text-critic correlation. It can appear at times like the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst; the latter not really there, a silent listener. Can this delayed conversation however, be more accurate and the only material available in this age of immediacy, the Internet? And does Cahill use the handmade flow of a pen and paper or the dictates of a computer machine to compose her Letter?
While these interrogations may be none of her concern, they are part of my own thread of thoughts as a devoted reader. Letter to Pessoa trembles under the structure of dialogic, incandescent narratives. It is a profound, subtle and important collection; one deserving of a deep appreciation through reading, and (re)reading.
WORKS CITED
Haskell, Dennis. “Seeing Eye to I: The Power of Asian Literatures.” Asialink, 01 Dec 2010.
<http://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/asialink-dialogues-and-applied-research/commentary-and-analysis/seeing-eye-to-i-the-power-of-asian-literatures>
PAUL GIFFARD-FORET obtained his PhD in Anglophone postcolonial literatures from Monash University in Australia. He works as a sessional lecturer in English at La Sorbonne University, Paris. He is involved in political activism and a member of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA).
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Black Rock, White City
by A.S. Patric
Transit Lounge
ISBN 9781921924835
Reviewed by NICOLE THOMAS
The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ fuelled fierce debate during the 1990’s when it was applied to atrocities being committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The euphemism for genocide was coined by perpetrators and adopted by journalists and politicians, penetrating official language. The definition of ‘ethnic cleansing’ remains a scrutinised topic. Defined by intent, genocide is a punishable crime that signifies mass murder while the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ remains undefined and denotes a lesser degree of harm. Blum et al. believe the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ “corrupts observation, interpretation, [and] ethical judgement”.
Black Rock White City follows poet Jovan and his wife Suzana, exiles of Sarajevo, as they struggle to find purpose in their life in suburban Melbourne. They survive in a displaced reality, in an emotionless afterlife punctuated by a war that claimed the lives of their two children. The displaced poetry of Jovan’s past emerges when he is forced to remove cryptic messages embedded in graffiti from the bayside hospital where he is employed as a cleaner. As Dr. Graffito’s destructive acts become increasingly violent, Jovan is forced to confront the trauma of his past.
Set in a hospital, the novel comprises an arrangement of euphemistic expressions, exhibiting the obscurity of figurative language to convey distinct meaning. The title, born from Melbourne suburb Black Rock and Belgrade’s literal translation to White City, takes the form of equivocation. The title’s contrasting colours, black and white, indicate a clear distinction between right and wrong doing—evil and virtue. Patric’s discourse leaves no rock unturned and solicits with bone chilling intelligence an examination of ethical judgement and decision making; an agenda intended for a distinct recognition between the terms ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide.
The destruction begins with a message, The / Trojan / Flea, written on the hospital X-Ray screen. Accumulating throughout the narrative is an assemblage of visual implements analogous to seeing and not seeing which stimulates an effect of clarity or obscurity. Words are engraved into optometry lenses, eye charts are altered with messages of graffiti, blurred reflections viewed through glass. The X-Ray screen acts as an object of awareness, prompting closer observation of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ in relation to genocide. Reference to the Trojan can be seen as a parable to the subterfuge the Greeks used to win the Trojan war, conveying by comparison the implications of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ which as a result of judicial interpretation excused perpetrators of war from legal consequence for atrocities which would otherwise be punishable in international law under the crime of genocide—by default making the perpetrators victorious. “Fleas on the Trojan Horse. Who knows what he actually meant?” (230). “Flea” is one of many words that comprise examples of word ambiguity. In this instance the character’s own interpretation offers an example of how meaning can evolve from common acceptance of a term, similarly in the way ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide are interpreted generically albeit far removed in meaning. Later in the narrative, Jovan comes upon stencil markings of dead bodies on the hospital floor and Dr. Graffito’s titled message “ethical cleansing”(200). Patric’s word evolution from ‘ethnic’ to ‘ethical’ supports an review of justice in relation to perpetrators of war and the ethical responsibility for genocide.
Patric’s main characters, Jovan and Suzana, exist without expression, rejecting language and communication in their struggle to survive displacement. In the afterlife of war, words written and spoken are as mute as the unspeakable deaths of their children, “Their names were Dejan and Ana. And there’s nothing more that can be said about the dead that doesn’t make them small, lost and forgotten” (51). The significance of rejecting words denies the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a euphemism to communicate acts of genocide. In contrast to the characters rejection of words, Patric has focused on communicating the senses both in content and form, with acute awareness of sight, sound, and language expression. Patric punctuates expressions to emphasise force of meaning, “A finger tapping him on the chest any time Jovan looked as if he might rise from his seat. Not as a threat, as punctuation for the story Mitrovich was telling…” (203). Punctuation too, is expressed by representation of exact words in their basic sense, which works to disambiguate meaning, “’A question for you,’ Jovan says loudly, placing a full stop into the doctor’s mouth” (44). This literal language—in contrast to symbolic marks of punctuation—is in a sense, another way of demonstrating the disambiguation of meaning. Patric’s literal translation of punctuation is seamlessly executed at the close of Chapter Two when the spotlight of focus is on the hospital Optometrist waiting at the station for a train.
“There has been a notion on many such occasions. It has always been a small idea barely the size of a full stop in whatever she was reading. She’s read that famous book by Tolstoy and remembers the images of a flame being blown out and a book being closed. But it’s not as easy as that. Or poetic. It is more like a pig hung from its rear legs and getting its throat cut. It is a mutilation the splintering bones of her skeleton had never prepared for. It is a demolition of her soul her imagination could never have conceived. There is no book to close. There is no candle. Such absurdly poetic images for the pages of a story.
When Miss Richards leaps off the platform at Hallam, she hits the shiny, clean, steel rails and breaks bones in her wrists and knees, and then the impact of the train shatters everything else, and tears her meat into bits, and spatters her blood across the hot dry rocks of Hallam station.” (53-54)
The scene at Hallam station ignites the senses. The shock of Miss Richards leap is a visceral sensation that plunges the reader into a punctuated vertical drop; the leap acting as a terminal line of exclamation above the “full stop”. Patric’s discourse is both figurative and literal and offers a collision of realities. The trauma of Miss Richards body hitting the rails and the impact of the train emphasises clarity and aids any uncertainty of meaning: In a sense the reader confronts the trauma head-on. The impact of pain and coming apart is contrast to a flickering image of death analogous to the scene from Anna Karenina, that expresses a metaphorical image that fails to convey the reality of death. The significance highlights the obscurity of figurative language to convey distinct meaning.
The narrative juxtaposes Jovan’s poetry and messages of graffiti to emphasise the disparity between forms of expression and interpreted meaning.
A river of Waste
Just below Your skin
your Bones rot in
history’s flowing shit
The poetry of Jovan’s past dislodges as it collides with the messages embedded in the graffiti, forcing Jovan to relive scenes from the war on Bosnia. Jovan’s recollections derive from actual news broadcasts of NATO’s air strikes on Belgrade in 1999. Patric’s use of discourse from real events imposes reflection and perspective, enforcing a way of understanding yet being far removed in experience from the reality of war; it’s a way of necessitating rememberance of events so the memory does not forget.
“Do not visualise the details. Do not try to imagine what husband and wife may, or may not, have thought or felt. As those images on television broadcasts could not fully penetrate the minds of Suzana and Jovan, or anyone watching anywhere else at the time, so no one will ever know anything of this experience… It can only excite brief feelings, the the way something might from a film, one of Jovan’s books, or the poetry that he used to put to paper…” (141-142)
The medical community and Jovan’s occupation as hospital janitor in this novel are details that spotlight attention on the delusion that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is as a measure for public health, the cleansing of a society or race, a euphemism that Blum et al. believe “bleaches the atrocities of genocide” (204). Dr. Graffito’s destructive acts turn to obliteration when a woman is found inside the hospital drowned in a bleach bath, and what emerges will leave no reader in two minds of this novels intent. Black Rock White City takes issue with war, examining the ethics of justice and crime in the case of Bosnia. It explores immigrant displacement and refugee experience, interrogating the nature of language to reveal how interpretive meaning can trivialise the realities and atrocities of war, impeding justice.
Notes
Blum, Rony, et al. “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Bleaches the Atrocities of Genocide †.” European Journal of Public Health 18.2: 204-09. Print.
Singleterry, Douglas. “”Ethnic Cleansing” and Genocidal Intent: A Failure of Judicial Interpretation?” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5.1 (2010): 39-67. Print.
Sirkin, Micol. “Expanding the Crime of Genocide to Include Ethnic Cleansing: A Return to Established Principles in Light of Contemporary Interpretations.” Seattle University Law Review 33.2: 489-526. Print.
NICOLE THOMAS lives on the South Coast of NSW. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts with Distinction from the University of Wollongong, and was awarded The UoW Centre for Canadian Australian Studies (CCAS) Award. Nicole is currently working on her memoir.