Caroline van de Pol reviews Slipstream by Catherine Cole

March 15, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Slipstream

By Catherine Cole

Valley Press

ISBN: 9781915606341

Reviewed by CAROLINE VAN DE POL

As an admirer of Catherine Cole’s earlier novels, short story collections and memoir such as Sleep, Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark and The Poet Who Forgot, I awaited the publication of her new book, Slipstream: On Memory and Migration, with great anticipation. I was not disappointed. The book’s subject matter of memory and migration had its appeal for me as the daughter of an Irish immigrant and Australian mother.

The book was inspired by a flight between Australia and the UK when Cole sensed that she ‘had been infected in some way by a blight common amongst the children of migrants; that desire to experience a life missed in the country abandoned by my parents.’ (Cole, p. 12). A little while later during her Hong Kong stopover she enviously watched the locals laughing and sharing stories or pointing things out to one another. ‘The city teemed with families who seemed welded to their lives there. They went back a long way, I decided, generations and generations, or so it seemed to me on that humid, solitary day.’ (Cole, p.14)

Cole dedicated the book to her brother, Brian, who as a small boy, travelled with his parents in 1949 from Yorkshire in northern England to Australia under the Ten Pound Pom scheme to Bankstown in Sydney’s South Western suburbs. Brian died in 2022 so he didn’t see the book in print but he and Cole spoke regularly about his memories. This loss of a brother adds a tinge of sadness to the book, an imperative also that we need to talk about our lives and acknowledge the courage with which we live them. I have lost family members too and this plangency echoed with me. I was drawn also to Cole’s thoughtful examination of what migration means to people and communities, especially her parents’ experience of migration.

There were many moments during my reading of Slipstream when I thought about family and friends from Vietnam, China and India who also have shared both joyful and devastating memories of migration. These dichotomies are well illustrated in the book in its reflections on the wider themes of migration and also in stories about what Cole describes as ‘reverse’ migration, her six years spent in the north of England. Cole also challenges the idea that Australia is a new country. In her chapter, Becoming Australian, she notes:

It rankles when people speak of Australia as a new country or part of the ‘new’ world. That is a colonial construct about who ‘discovered’ the place, denying its original people their land and culture – the oldest continuous surviving culture in the world – asserting that the continent was empty. In fact, we live on a thin veneer of history, a ‘relatively short span of Australia’s British settler colonial history, a history that has barely scratched the land’s surface.’ (Cole, p 123)

The layering of wider issues beyond migration, of the split self as depicted in Cole’s reminiscing and reflecting, is a feature of the texture of this tale of contrasting worlds: the sacrifices of leaving home and family in search of a better life. Migrants leave their old homes to seek a new one in a new place. Like so many post war migrants, Cole’s family built their own home first living in a garage sized temporary homes as the permanent home took shape. Cole reflects on what this rehoming means and how home takes on a whole new meaning when sacrifice and optimism meet. She quotes the social historian Ghasan Hage who wrote that a home:

has to be a space open for opportunities and hope. Most theorizations of the home emphasize it as a shelter, but, like a mother’s lap, it is only a shelter that we use for rest before springing into action and then return to, to spring into action again. (Hage in Cole, p102)

Slipstream also explores what has changed since the post war experience of migration and why we are far less tolerant towards migration today. Early in her book, Cole poses the question of changing sympathies for migrants and refugees. While her parents’ journey in 1949 was part of one of the world’s largest mass migrations and one in seven people have now made a new home somewhere in the world, she interrogates this shifting attitude:

Why then, are we so unsympathetic to those who need a safe place? When watching as people flee wars, march towards closed borders or apply fruitlessly for economic migration, it is easy to forget just how fortunate our own families were. (Cole, p 16)

Slipstream also examines the impact of migration on family members, especially those families where some of the children were born overseas and others in the new land. Cole explores a migrant’s grief and loss and the way in which they often cling to their former cultural identity to assuage these feelings. Slipstream offers a humorous and heart-warming story of Cole’s own split between two worlds (the one of her parents in northern England and that of the sandy shores and sunburn of Sydney) while also witnessing from a young age, the struggle of her parents to ‘fit in’. She writes, ‘I want to chronicle how they plaintively memorialised the old world while staying ambitious and optimistic for the new one.’ (Cole, p20) This chronicling takes a number of forms throughout Slipstream. As well as her reflections of migration history and the ways in which other writers have pursued the topic, Cole uses anecdotes and memories to heighten the book’s atmosphere and affect. In one she recalls the way the old world entered the new Australian one via letters and parcels from Yorkshire:

One of the first things my father built on our block of land was a letter box, a neat tin affair with a sloping lid that made it look like a little tin house on top of a post, or like one of my brother’s Hornby tin train stations. The number 80 was painted clumsily on the front. It waited daily for the postman, who rode on his bike down the hill to our place, to deposit whatever thin aerogramme he had in his mail pouch that day. Sometimes he brought a parcel wrapped in canvas or parachute silk, but as time progressed these thinned out to birthdays and Christmas. (Cole p109)

Cole’s search for self in this classical memoir is engaging and offers a balance of distance and introspection. She longs for more detail about her parents’ former lives in their Yorkshire mining village and the shock of Sydney’s western suburbs in comparison. Yet she manages to draw a rich portrait of those early years:

I also want to revisit my parents’ old ‘stomping grounds’ to talk to the ghosts who populate their former lives. What might I gain from these encounters? Self-understanding, historical context, peace of mind in regards to my oddly misshapen identity, that layered self I carry about with me; Australian, British, global, one of the ‘citizens of everywhere and nowhere’. (Cole, p.20)

A feature of Cole’s approach in this important memoir is the inclusion of other views, writers and academics who have looked closely at migration and what it means for them personally and for society. The discussions of migration’s impact on individuals and communities offers perspectives, including writer George Kouvaros who wrote that migration is about a ‘dispersal of the narrative details that we use to understand the people close to us’. The book also draws on the research of historians Paula Hamilton and Kate Darian-Smith, and Hammerton and Thomson in the UK whose research focused on families such as Coles, calling them ‘Australia’s Forgotten Migrants.’

The ways in which the children of migrants feel torn between their parents’ old culture and their own new one offers reflections on the passion for travel that Cole and her peers pursued in backpacking holidays to the ‘old’ country. Cole made several such journeys to her parents’ homeland, the first a six-week journey on a ship bound for England, as a backpacker when she was still a teenager. The significance of the sea – its moodiness, the inability to hold on to it, this kind of ‘slipstream’ permeates Cole’s story and travels. She notes that it is no accident that she first travelled to England by sea – all her life she had heard stories about her family’s passage to Australia on the Empire Brent and here was her opportunity to experience their sea voyage in reverse:

Travelling by sea seems to open vast philosophical conundrums. It causes you to rethink your size and shape and mobility. It offers danger, beauty, secrets. You ponder them at dusk as the sun sinks into the ship’s churning wake and syrens call you to them.’ (Cole, p 41)

Reading about Cole’s desire to trace her parents’ footsteps around northern England – in particular, the roads and lanes and coal mines of Yorkshire – I was reminded of my own desperate longing to live the life I felt I missed out on. This desire to keep our dead relatives living through writing is well-documented by memoirists around the world. Cole writes about her journey through Yorkshire with the ghosts of her family, following them north across Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumberland to their stepping off point on the Clydeside docks of Glasgow. In similar sentiment of the longing and remembering shared by Palestinian author, Atef Abu Saif, Cole shares her yearning to keep her family and her dying brother alive and moving forward.

Cole’s travel is revelatory. She waits ‘like an animal ready to pounce’ on any new insights or stories that help her to understand her own family and their place in the world’s migrant stories. All the while, she is wishing for the conversations with her parents – more stories, more jokes or explanations – she never got to fully enjoy before both had died. It’s true that our thanks to our parents for their sacrifices often come too late. ‘Waiting for the next story and the next,’ she writes, ‘those narratives which, stitched together, make a person who they are and what they understand of themselves.’ (Cole, p 210)

The shape and structure of Slipstream is both meandering and provocative, encouraging the reader to see more than one view of the places Cole visits or where she resides, Bankstown, Liverpool, London, Melbourne, Sydney and of the people and politics she encounters. A favourite part of the memoir for me was a recall of her university days and the reforms made possible to our generation by the Whitlam Government of 1972 – 1975. Those years transformed Australia with their visionary changes, including those to migration policies and multiculturalism under the guidance of Ministers such as Al Grassby. Slipstream also captures the tyranny of memory and the ways in which we remember our families. One particular passage felt particularly poignant as the child Cole lines up for a family photo underneath a flowering jacaranda tree:

Our family home in Bankstown also retains a tyranny of memory. Now both parents are dead, my siblings and I rarely talk about the house, nor about those unsettled early years when we became Australians, in theory at least. The house might rise before us when a memory needs verification. Was it then? Where was that? Waiting for older siblings’ memories to act as the binding agent for something not quite formed. Our parents can’t be asked at all. But the dead speak through photographs and tape recordings, in a flickering family home movie of us all standing self-consciously in front of the flowering jacaranda opposite the back door, its bell flowers drifting above us like purple snow. (Cole, p.113)

Cole’s migrant parents sacrificed so much of themselves and their history for her and her siblings but their story suggests they had no regrets about leaving. Once settled in their new lives they eventually embraced Australia’s way of life, all the while retaining their quintessential Yorkshire ways and accents. Now Cole’s extended family is a multicultural one. The Cole children marries partners from Maltese, English, Irish, Austrian, Indian, and Italian backgrounds. The opportunities of work and education available in Australia in that era are well documented in Slipstream too and they convey how much countries benefit from and can support diverse communities. This is the hope and promise of migration.

Lisa Collyer reviews Carapace by Misbah Wolf

February 27, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Carapace

by Misbah Wolf

ISBN 978-1-925735-41-3

Vagabond

Reviewed by LISA COLLYER
 
 
You can imagine tracing the spiral on the white snail shell on the front cover of Misbah Wolf’s second poetry collection, Carapace to find yourself centred in a temporary house. Wolf’s scintillating and edgy collection of prose poems form individual houses with their fully justified box-shape with an entrance and an exit. Each house is named for their characteristics experienced subjectively by the poet, an experience of phenomena that transcends walls, closets, and beds, and rather how houses shape the inhabitants. In ‘COMMON PEOPLE HOUSE’ (p.21) the female residents transform into ‘witches’ (p.21) as they ‘tuck him (‘a man almost dead drunk’) in again, us in our dark robes/ muttering over his body and bringing water to his lips’ (p.21) in an alchemical reinvention of self.

Wolf opens the door on the house, and the mysteries of poetry with the use of the egalitarian form of the prose poem, a revitalised form that is on trend for its sense of breaching genre boundaries. We, the readers are invited in, to follow the inner perimeter of house. There are entry points and exit points, but this is not a linear progression, the spiral turns in on itself, in an attempt, to find itself at home, unrealised until the final poem, ‘THIS MUST BE THE PLACE HOUSE’ (p.45). But first there is a journey into strangers’ homes like in ‘HOUNDS OF LOVE HOUSE’ (p.9) where possessions are so limited, they can be ‘bundled into four garbage/ bags’ (p.9). Unlike the objective account of a home that appears on paper to be inviting, the ‘kitchen was white marble’ (p.9) the phenomenological experience is alienating ‘a middle-aged woman/ who never wanted to talk to her’ (p.9) and ‘a/ fridge stocked with food that was not hers.’ (p.9) Perhaps the symbolism of ‘white’ is the dominant racism that the POC poet suffers. The speaker’s dreams help her make sense of her rootlessness as she is transferred symbolically into a ‘tiny white poodle incessantly scratching at her bedroom door…’ Won’t anyone let me in?

This search for home is at times a plea in ‘H IS FOR’ (p.10) and conjures Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space in the way it takes root in the sensory and experiential relationship to setting. This longing to be let in, to find a house that feels like home, is a desire to belong where the senses reign supreme, the urge to ‘run my hands through the dad’s hair’ ‘over the dirty knives on the kitchen counter, block/ out the telly with my form’ (p.10) is perhaps a need to take up space, inhabit a setting, to be seen inside as part of the furniture and therefore safe as houses.

Wolf is unapologetic in her honesty of the most intimate goings on in-house. This is what makes the collection so authentic; it doesn’t gloss over the abject nature of ablutions and sex. In ‘MRS ROBINSON’S HOUSE’ (p.25) the speaker enters a prohibited space with a tryst with a married man, hence the allusion to the film ‘The Graduate’ and theme song. The drole tone with the familiar yet unlikely excuse ‘You were married but you had an understanding with your wife’(p.25) follows the abject ‘You slipped your finger over my bloody menstrual pad which only/ amplified the sincerity of your next move’ in homage to Kristeva, the abject and desire are intermingled into the most confessional and private moment in the hunt for transcendence. And we know this, and we’ve all been there, but Wolf gives this space in the most personal of place, the home.

The sense that faraway places inhabit our beings and form our sense of self is captured in the lusty ‘JE TE VEUX HOUSE’ (p.31) where Tibet inhabits ‘The house (that) stretched like a big turd that’s been freshly shitted from a gigantic/ brick beetle (even though it)…was 9351 Km (away.)’ (p.31) The bodies are separated, not by proximity but spirit of affiliating with another country being occupied by the lover, invaded by the raider, and discarded like the two-timer is sensuously rendered ‘In the night a ribbon-like body of water called you and I realised/…there was now a ravine between us.’ (p.31) The speaker addresses the lover with the direct ‘you’ and we the reader are invited to be privy to the affair that coils to a fever pitch only to be discarded for a new temporary abode, another shell, perhaps new shelter.

The prose poem is an outlier: its form is defiant as is Queer space, an intimacy seen as genre bending. Hence, the form has taken off with Queer expression that is flammable in ‘UNDER THE PINK HOUSE’ (p.32). The poem begins ‘It was pornographic science fiction’ with the premise of speculative fiction, ‘What if?’ laying down a dare to imagine Queer space as mainstream. The speaker’s passion is whipped into a sexual frenzy that ‘lassoed me to the bed, and your pussy adopted/ the same penetrating gaze’ disrupting the male gaze for the queer gaze and the site of cunt power. The pluralism of female genitalia embodies Luce Irigaray’s book, ‘This Sex which is not One’ in its celebration of the layers and multiplicity of that which is considered ‘one’ ‘hole’ ‘empty space’.

‘In the centremost labyrinth of your labia, I unintentionally/ scryed your future and saw echoes of tall trees in gentle winds, fingers/ turning pages of burning books with images of hungry baby birds that/ would be unlikely figures of your liberation.’

The ‘L’ word is tossed around in a search for togetherness but like the search for home, it is elusive. In ‘WILD HORSES HOUSE’ (p.12) there is a violence to the coupling ‘This awkward painful screwing that will bleed/ out.’ (p.12) and is perhaps significant of the first time, or sexual violence, or just bad sex. The futility of life is expressed through allusion to Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ where the speaker’s bleak life is reflected upon with ‘This/ cannot be it, surely’ demonstrating the restlessness of the speaker and the hope for so much more. The violence or just lack of real affection is amplified with the only tender touch to be that of ‘Kafka roaches’ soft antennae combing her face in the/ night.’ A sense of annihilation is vividly rendered with the very stark image of ‘cockroaches may survive up to a week without a/ head by just breathing through their skin’ (p.12) and we reflect on what seems the futility of everyday life.

The poem ‘THE CONSTRUCTION OF LIGHT HOUSE’ (p34) reads like an inventory of a rental account of a shared house: a bit battered like its residents but will do as a temporary space, but there is more than just ‘mustardy yellow cupboards’ ‘unpolished wood’ (p34) and ‘windows looking on to a sloping backyard’(p34): there are also ‘contrails’ (p34) on the floor, residue of a face planted, the imprint a person leaves behind on the house, and the marks left within the bodies of the experiential ‘this line/ cuts through time and flesh.’ (p34) This poem is an homage to the share house, to temporary house buddies who are everything in that sliver of time, but will not live on in your next transformation and the boy who will ‘never make it as a writer’; he too is a passing fling, like the ‘stray (cat) who wandered in one day and/ never left. You end up belonging to each other.’ (p.34) And like the temporary houses we call homes, they too are like a beacon of hope, where when the lights go out, love, lust and violence happen. Most of all Carapace is about the discarded shells and the resonance of those shelters that live on and on in our bodies, our only permanent homes.
 
 
LISA COLLYER is a poet and educator and the author of How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023)
Life Before Man Books, Gazebo Books. She was short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award
and was an Inspire writer-in-residence with The National Trust of W.A.

Jennifer Compton reviews The Detective’s Chair by Anne M Carson

February 23, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Detective’s Chair

by Anne M. Carson

LiquidAmber Press

ISBN 9780645044980

Reviewed by JENNIFER COMPTON
 
 

Poetry has many pleasures, and, as quite a few of us might suspect, an almost equal share of pains. But every so often, every so often, a book comes along that panders to my desire to loll about reading a detective novel, one hand dipping into the box of chocs and riffling the paper cups to come upon an orange cream, which is my favourite. I am aware, out of the corner of my eye, of the literature outlining the comfort of a rules-based, escapist genre, where the murder victim is rarely, if ever, someone you have come to like. But it wasn’t until I read Carson’s “Reflections on writing The Detective’s Chair” at the back of this book, that I twigged that what I am really liking is the almost preternatural intuition of the crime solvers.

‘The insight came to me while I was sitting in my favourite red, upholstered chair with my legs curled beneath, a pot of Madura tea to hand: my favourite fictional detectives solve crimes similar to how I write poems. They are essentially creative people – and solving crimes is an essentially creative act.’

Then I surrendered, willy nilly, to my baser nature and riffled through the pages to check out my favourites. My orange creams. Miss Jane Marple of St Mary Mead. Who, whilst weeding her herbaceous borders, looks boldly into the dark heart of wickedness. And Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgleish, of Scotland Yard, who resorts to writing poetry – your actual slim volumes – between cadavers. Although he is appropriately self-deprecating. And, of course, Inspector Kurt Wallander in Ystad, Sweden, shambling around in a welter of piles of dirty laundry and unmet obligations –

‘ … desperate for a few motionless
moments to let his thoughts run unfettered. A niggle, just out of
reach, an uneasy ache he knows holds vital clues. Something
someone said or didn’t say–elusive since the first murder. If only he
could sit quietly, listen long and open enough for it to unfurl, maybe
it would crack the case wide open.’ (p65).

Now this poem is called “Uneasy ache” but I first came upon it when it was called “The Detective’s Chair” – a singeleton, an outrider, the harbinger of plenty – and I was very much struck with the intersection of popular culture and poetry. I may have become forceful in my desire for more. I remember discussing the difficulties of tackling Commissario Guido Brunetti, because he is happy, as Anne and I took our keepcup coffees down to Carrum beach during the longeurs of Covid lockdown.

‘There is nothing noir about Guido Brunetti. Noir needs ground of
loneliness, food of melancholy. Crime-solving gets him down from
time to time but he is reflective, philosophical, dives into Herodotus
for distance. On the case, he is professional, meticulous; his nose
and native cunning winkle clues out. He doesn’t come home from
violence to empty taunting rooms, to the siren song of ghosts -’ (p11).

However, I am not meaning to imply that this is not poetry of the most serious intent and of the highest order. It understands its place within the oeuvre, it invokes tried and true devices, it succeeds as poetry. But, because it is entangled with another genre, there is a kind of slippage, and also of homage. Carson has laid down solid rules for herself, in the spirit of the genre she has playfully appropriated. Each take on a detective is a fourteen line prose poem. I suppose you could almost aver – sonnets of the prose poem ilk.

Quickly, I must mention, one of the delights of this delightful book, produced by the indefatigable Liquidamber Press, are the quirky illustrations by René Carrasco, which seem to glow with nostalgia for a simpler age. As does the dedication to Dorothy Porter for her heroic ploy to get poetry out of the bottom shelves at the back of the book shop into the display stands at the front with The Monkey’s Mask. That worked well for her, but that was 1994. However it was a bold move, and it made its mark.

‘Jill’s too busy courting trouble on the mean streets for
time in a chair, feet-up. When she grabs moments from the
malestrom, it’s her backyard fishpond which settles her. She
becomes mesmerised by the gold swirl and swish beneath, the
glimpse of a tail, hypnotic lure of dreamy movement and then the
shape of an idea emerges from the depths, leading to her next step.’ (p7).

Please do buy this book for a childhood friend or a brother-in-law or a great-aunt who isn’t quite sure they like poetry much, but who you know devours detective fiction. And then watch them forget that it is poetry they are reading, as they flick back and forth checking out whether Carson has included their particular favourites, and also to get ideas for authors new to them to chase up. And then watch them becoming absorbed and reflective as the poetry does its work.

 
 
JENNIFER COMPTON is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. She lives in Melbourne on unceded Boon Wurrung Country. Recent Work Press published her 11th book of poetry the moment, taken in 2021.

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn reviews Every Version of You by Grace Chan

February 7, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Every Version of You

by Grace Chan

ISBN: 9781922806017

Reviewed by Zowie Douglas

In 2022, as AI-generated images began to populate our social media feeds, RnB artist SZA released Ghost in the Machine, in which she sings: ‘Robot got future, I don’t.’ The future and the present are uncomfortably close in Grace Chan’s Every Version of You, where the characters inhabit a world that is startingly familiar to ours. The protagonist, a young woman named Tao-Yi and her partner Navin live in Southbank, Melbourne, where the average outdoor temperature is too hot for prolonged exposure. Other than the climate, places such as Berwick, Townsville and Port Douglas are recognizable. Most people wear ‘Revisions’, AI-augmented interfaces which filter the world and provide useful information, including temperature, radiation, and airborne pollution levels. Characters consume ersatz food like Koffee and use robotic vacuum cleaners. Nursing homes employ droids to deal with old people. All these things build on current trajectories to create a mid-2100 era that feels too close to home, from technology to language use. Internet slang like ‘meatspace’, for example, has been adapted to become vernacular to describe the physical world as opposed to being in Gaia, where most of the characters in Every Version of You spend their time.

The novel plot turns on the decision to ‘upload’, that is whereby characters physically die, giving up their bodies in exchange for eternal ‘life’ in hyperspace. In this way, Every Version of You introduces humanoid technologies similar to other recent works of science fiction, such as Olga Ravn’s The Employees, whose narrator says: ‘It’s my job to get rid of terminated workers and, in a few instances, bodies left over after sickness or re-uploading.’ Instead of being a ship steward, Tao-Yi is a woman overboard. The plot of Every Version of You operates as an Odyssey of sorts: Tao-Yi could upload to Gaia with her lover and ‘exist’ in a state of eternal youth, but she decides not to; instead, she remains on earth, where she is determined to return to her grandmother’s ancestral home. Tao-Yi grew up in Malaysia, where her attachment to earth appears to be rooted in childhood memories and obligations: ‘Honouring Poh-Poh is more important than playing with friends in a make-believe world,’ her mother, Xin-Yi scolds a young Tao-Yi. ‘How would you feel if no one paid respects to your soul after death?’ To which Tao-Yi replies, ‘I’d be dead, so I wouldn’t feel anything.’

In Every Version of You, hyperspace becomes the locus of existence, even though its permanent residents are technically, corporeally dead. Those who visit Gaia experience a host of larger-than-life experiences, while life on Earth is stifling and depressing. Tao-Yi’s partner Nevin, who suffers from chronic kidney disease, is one of the first characters to abandon the crumbling spectre of Melbourne to upload into Gaia. Notably, the first subject to undertake the uploading process is a disabled woman. ‘A car accident at the age of three rendered Marisa quadriplegic. She moved and fed and bathed with integrated assistive technology.’ Here, Marisa’s state of being is similar to the experience of people who access Gaia inside the Neupod, a kind of isolation tank filled with gel. The user needs to shave their head to attach the equipment, rendering them infant-like in appearance. There is an element of body horror to the book’s tactile fleshiness; while the user is physically motionless, the body breaks down in graphic detail. In this way, the world building of Every Version of You is not always the most original, but it builds on influences from The Matrix and other science fiction in a compelling fashion, tempered by detailed character arcs and emotional depth.

In terms of augmented reality and artificial intelligence, the book feels prescient. In August of 2023, a 47-year-old woman was able to speak for the first time in 18 years through an avatar with the assistance of a brain-computer-interface, or BCI. The woman had lost her mobility at age 29 as a result of a brainstem stroke. The BCI is attached via electrodes to an area of her brain and runs a on language model similar to Chat GPT, where her electrical signals are ‘translated’ into words and conveyed by an avatar on screen, simulating speech much more quickly and accurately than earlier speech synthesisers.

In a similar way, language and technology are tightly intertwined in Every Version of You, where everything is bodily, earthy, tactile. Tao-Yi’s Revision is ‘clotted’ with advertisements. Bundles of wires are described as being like ‘spilled guts’. Nevin and Tao-Yi argue ‘with their mouths to each other’s ears, breathing in synchrony.’ Nevin is far less attached than Tao-Yi to the physical world. ‘We kill off our old selves all the time,’ he says to Tao-Yi. This idea of reinvention as self-obliteration is a recurring duality in Every Version of You, alongside the blurred border between information and language, mind and body.

Throughout the novel, Tao-Yi is haunted by her grandmother’s history of depression. ‘Her poh-poh died in 2043, fifty-four years old, alone in a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur. A suicide note, torn from the pages of a journal, crumped between the sheets.’ Tao-Yi’s maternal lineage forms a bastion of reality that is returned to over and over, bringing her literally down to earth while her peers are rushing to escape into hyperspace. ‘The earliest Uploaders will be seen as pioneers,’ said Zach, a friend of Tao-Yi and Navin. Here, I was reminded of Shoshana Zuboff’s nonfiction book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, in which Zuboff likens the advance of Big Data as a kind of digital dispossession, harvesting private citizens’ information to enrich tech empires while controlling their access to the online world. But those who upload see themselves as explorers of a new frontier, even as their memories are being absorbed into servers at a high financial and physical cost.

Gaia might provide an escape from mortality, but it’s no panacea. As Tao-Yi says, ‘We built the same spaces and borders, the same sort of bodies, and set everything ticking to the same flow of time.’ To this her friend Zach replies, ‘We stick to the boring utopias.’ I was reminded of Steve Toltz’s novel Here Goes Nothing, where heaven turns out to be a bureaucratic world of austerity, full of the same inconveniences and absurdity of earthly life.

In Gaia, the line between commerce and life remains nebulous, creating an anxiety between what is ‘real’ and what is artificially manufactured: ‘Her tummy grumbles. Is the system telling her that her actual tummy is grumbling, or has the Neupod tracked her blood sugars dropping and triggered an artificial signal? Or has the cafeteria paid for hunger triggers?’ Marketing imbues the world in ‘comm’ speak, and most human art including music is widely designed by algorithm. The characters inhabit a world where mathematical order rules, but this tends to recreate inequalities rather than level them out. For instance, bots abound in poorer, outdated districts: ‘Some have been bought by earnest shopkeepers from developing countries, taking advantage of the cheaper real estate to find a way into Gaia.’

In any case, for Tao-Yi and those few who remain on earth, their commitment runs through the knowledge that they are the outliers in a world saturated by artificial intelligence, a kind of hanger-on to a sinking ship as the earth’s regulatory systems break down. They are the ghost in the machine, even as the avatars who flit between servers lose their bodily forms.

ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN lives in Tasmania. Her work has appeared recently in Overland, Island, Meanjin, The Age and others, and her essays and short stories have been awarded the Scribe Nonfiction Prize and the Ultimo Prize for Young Writers. She is the previous editor of Voiceworks.

Dominique Hecq reviews she doesn’t seem autistic by Esther Ottaway

December 22, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

she doesn’t seem autistic

by Esther Ottaway

Puncher and Wattman

ISBN 978-1-922571-76-2

Reviewed by DOMINIQUE HECQ

Esther Ottaway’s third book of poetry, she doesn’t seem autistic, explores a neglected area of psychological medicine: autism in women. It is by default that Ottaway herself was diagnosed, when a specialist established that her youngest daughter was autistic. Although partly autobiographical, the persona in the poems is ‘a composite woman and girl,’ Ottaway tells us in her foreword: she wants ‘to show [us] a profile of autism that [we] are not familiar with’ (12). 

The collection documents the symptoms of female autism across a spectrum as well as the inevitable misdiagnoses. It also poignantly exposes the core of the speaker’s humanity—in this case, what affects her. In Andy Jackson’s words, the book is ‘a revelation.’

Symptoms of female autism include empathy arousal, rejection sensitive dysphoria, alexithymia, situational mutism, masking, echolalia, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, dyspraxia, hypotonia, dyscalculia, avoidant/restrictive food intake syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, delayed sleep disorder, narcolepsy, pathological demand avoidance, dysautonomia, panic disorder, depression, etc. Repress the desire to laugh, because this is not funny. Miss Diagnosis is psychological medicine’s own worst symptom. As Ottaway shows triumphantly towards the end of the collection, labels come unstuck. Are torn to shreds. And yes, as she affirms in ‘Joy to my world,’ her own ‘revelation’ (74) means a belief in change.

And the poems? Ah, the poems. They show how poetry is created from the bodymind, its affects and memories. Riposting to Ottaway’s dismissal of the word ‘good’ in ‘How are you?’ (57), I’d say the poems are achingly good. These are not poems trapped on the surface—the surface of observation, information, narration, sleek language.  Here, there is rhythmic intensity that fuses emotion, breath and thought, incorporating profound, associative insight.

Consider, for example the opening to ‘There is always a giraffe,’ which takes us back to the persona’s childhood:

Cool as a whale
Mrs Haydon is stepping backwards through water

patient with this small giraffe
who has failed at every sport

all neck and skittery hooves,
large-eyed, patterned with shame.

Consider how it catches gracefully the movement it needs for grief. How it carries with dismay the child’s terror, and then with respect the newly found knowledge of death, ‘asking if it’s worse to drown, or fall’
(28).

Perhaps these unknowns associated with terror and death present Ottaway’s powering creativity with a tempering negativity. This would seem to be the implication of the book’s first poem, ‘After writing a book on female autism, I decide to bury it,’ where birth and death, breath and dread are intertwined in the figure of ‘that bleating woman’ (13) who nonetheless dares to offer the danger of poetry. 

‘The shamed body addresses its owner,’ responding to a sense of dissociation, is achingly good, too: its feeling is finely judged, its observation has a convincing mix of deflection, fixation and ambivalence. It is almost speechless:

You say my names: but will you introduce me
to your friends?  Are you still ashamed –
(52)

Another standout in this collection is ‘Illanelle,‘ where the body is at war with itself, its ‘lifelong illness… auto-immune,’ adumbrating as it does its own ‘release’ (53). There is something about death that is teaching Esther Ottaway’s layered poetry a new clarity. Perhaps it is a particular kind of newly found carelessness. Or confidence.

At another level, it encourages just a little too much care, as if presence, evoked through sensate detail, might compensate for absence, as in ‘Perennially gaslit, the autistics reject humanity,’ where the persona talks to (her)self and needs more detachment so that desire can get free of guilt and shame:

We aren’t’ wanted,
won’t be missed. Little wonder
that we shy now at this pillory

go to the insects, plants, land, sky. (65)

In the face of such debilitating condition, Ottaway finds in poetic practice a way of enacting a discipline. It might seem effortless, but not many poets can achieve this balancing of the imponderable and impermanent, this balancing of lines so that they incorporate at once the movement of breath and bodymind. Ottaway has learned how to set her subject free: she exercises a discipline of line; she practices precise observation and sometimes self-deprecation; she discreetly deploys a specialised lexicon and, above all, empathy. Some might say that she writes without ego, but I disagree: wit and humour undercut a refreshing self-consciousness.

In ‘Neurodiverse’ Ottaway achieves a level of imaginative embodiment I find puzzling. Through a linguistic play of deferrals and reversals, the poem achieves something close to spiritual power. Something I only experienced by accident in a yoga practice I failed at again and again—and have long since abandoned. Here suffering, emptiness and desire coalesce:

Deserve in our
derive. No ruse.
Revise, undo re
overused rein.
Never die sour! (75)

The imaginative process rests on inter reaching reciprocities; it is useless to want one dimension to explain another, as if the poem were a response to an idea that had some temporal, causal and linguistic priority. It is a pared down, even compact poem. And yet it spawns innumerable interpretations through letter reconfiguration and linguistic border crossing.  Never die sour / [nev-uh-duh-zai-uh]. Rein / rien (nothing). Derive / dérive (drift). Who is writing here? Esther, or me? Until fairly recently, ours (ours?) was not a subject-position from which autism was usually considered, writes another poet grappling, as I do, with what it means to write from the perspective of an autistic subject.1

Themes recur and resonate throughout Esther Ottaway’s work: pregnancy, parenthood, loss, grief and more generally, family ties, but it seems to me that she has found ways to embody them more fully in she doesn’t seem autistic than in her two previous collections to amplify the architecture of her poetry so that what might have been mere observation or information acquires layers of narrative and thought that convey a more profound, a more fully realised experience of interconnectedness. Here is the opening to ‘How to have an autistic friend,’ where the syntax performs this interconnectedness:

See that my scales flash gilt:
the prowess, gift.
Acknowledge the lack in me,
how baffling the lacunae.
Invite me, fit the schedule to me.
If I can’t answer. If I forget,
remind. Remind anyway. When I can’t follow through,
be kind. Remember the iceberg
balancing under this peak,
how intensely I’m thrashing
underwater. See
what can’t be seen, like city stars. Give me rest
and more rest, time, time
and more time.
(79)

Above all, what strikes in this collection is the inventiveness of the language. Enjoy the full response to ‘How have you succeeded despite having autism?’. Here is the hilarious beginning:

At first, I am disauder, distressed auganism. I cannot count on the
audinary. Efforts come to naut – I triage, relinquish, harden up: hindsight
and forethaut my advisors, flight my reliable last resaut. I am an auphan
in this singular authogenesis, autonomous but so hamstrung, my
writing my only authodox ability, stamp on my passpaut…

My own revelation comes intertwined with an anecdaut. 

… empathy arousal, rejection sensitive dysphoria, alexithymia, situational mutism, masking, echolalia, sensory processing disorder, avoidant/restrictive food intake syndrome, delayed sleep disorder, pathological demand avoidance, panic disorder, depression… mania and hypervigilance …

My youngest (a boy) says: We’re all on the spectrum, mum. That includes you. My jaw drops. F. labels. Mind the book’s last poem, ‘The autistic woman’s self-compassion blessing,’ I sway to myself. 2

Notes:

1 Joanne Limburg 2017 ‘The Shape of the Problem’, The Poetry Review, 131.
2 Pun intended.

DOMINIQUE HECQ was born in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. Hecq writes in English and French. Her creative works comprise a novel, six collections of short stories and  fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry. Her latest publications  include After Cage (2^nd ed., 2022, Liquid Amber Press) Endgame with No Ending (2023, SurVision), winner of the 2022 James Tate Poetry Prize, and a bilingual poetry sequence titled Songlines / Pistes de rêve, with photographs by Natia Zvhania (Transignum, 2023).

Varuna Naicker reviews We Need to Talk by Manveen Kholi

December 10, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

We Need To Talk

by Manveen Kholi

ISBN-10 ‏  9392494297

Red River Press

in partnership with Centre for Stories

Reviewed by VARUNA NAICKER

We Need To Talk is raw, truthful and confronting. Manveen Kohli, a British-Indian poet, captures the brutal hypocrisy of what it is like to live in a society where the existence of women is a contradiction. The honesty in which Kohli writes her poetry leaves the reader nowhere to turn but to confront the harsh truth that we force young women into a lion’s den without raising a finger to tame the many lions. From the title, Kohli had my attention. We Need To Talk. The masterful 4 words instill an alertness for what is to come next. The title foreshadows the content of the entire book: I need you to listen to what I have to say. 

The first section of eight, the poem “When My Home Country isn’t Home” dives headfirst into exploring the contradictions of Indian society. What is immediately noticeable is the choice of language Kohli employs. Her verses are sparse and not overly layered with descriptive metaphors and similes. She lets the subject matter do the talking and her poetry is all the more powerful for it. “When My Home Country isn’t Home” immediately acknowledges Kohli’s position to the reader as an Indian living outside of India; an insider and outsider in the eyes of Indian society: 

These people always remind me
that India is home,
but won’t ever talk about how I am treated
as a foreigner.
(13) 

She quickly transitions topic, highlighting the unbalanced accountability women and men are subject to in this society. Using emotive religious language, Kohli drives home the point that piety is preached whereas respect for women’s bodies and their agency are not: 

an uncle will put his hands
on his niece’s body
and use those very hands to pray,
(14) 

The verses move quickly and cut to the heart of the issue. The minimal, blunt language creates a sombre tone which aids Kohli’s overall objective; this is necessary conversation, not a nice one. 

As We Need To Talk continues, it is clear that the entire book will be unapologetic in its commentary of the society the author sees around her. For some, this may be confronting but if so, that is all the more reason why it is needed. This is incredibly true for the next two poems “Daddy’s Issues” and “Don’t Call Me Pretty”. The two poems are dark and reference the violence the author is subjugated to by those she trusts. In “Daddy’s Issues”, Kohli challenges the primordial pedestal which the concept of ‘family’ sits upon within Indian society. 

She refuses to dilute the experiences of her father’s abuse to save their relationship, challenging the patriarchy entrenching Indian society through her closest source: her father. Indian women see this time and time again. We are told to forget our grievances in favour of protecting the family dynamic. Familial domestic violence is punctuated with an asterisk as if to say that it is less severe than violence outside the home because forgiveness is waiting behind the door, biding time until the victimised family member walks through. But Kohli draws a clear line in the sand, instead opting to not absolve her father of his crimes; she will not carry the burden of forgiving him, as if she does, she is betraying herself:

so I will stop here
because Dad,
writing about you
is like returning
to war while
still having PTSD.
(24) 

“Don’t Call Me Pretty” returns to examine the societal contradiction rooted in misogyny where women are framed as instigators, despite the fact that sexual violence being inflicted upon them. The repetitive phrase: 

Didn’t you know?(30) 

The phrase punctuates each double standard, reinforcing femininity as dangerous for purely existing: 

Didn’t you know that
your breasts and legs
should have
been concealed
for your body is a meal,
(30) 

The verses poke holes in how we understand consent through a harrowing account of sexual violence. The author begs the question: what is the point of teaching girls consent when it is the boys who need to learn? The simple, plain language puts the irony of blaming women front and centre. The reader is hard pressed to concede that this is anything but injustice at its worst. 

While the earlier poems in We Need To Talk are imbued with anger, grief, and a demand for accountability from the external forces at play, Kholi’s later poems take on an introspective and reflective nature: they are letters to herself (in fact one is titled “Love Letters to Myself’). “Intrusive Thoughts” uses perhaps the most poetic language out of the entire collection. Kohli describes to the reader how insidious her anxiety can be and the various ways it manifests itself by sabotaging her daily existence. She does not break away from her pattern of using minimalist language, and although the tone is still direct, there is a trepidation that is not as apparent in her previous poems. It only adds to the rawness of her work and shows that We Need To Talk encompasses many topics that are not broached in Indian society, mental health being a core one. The juxtaposition between the fleeting nature of anxiety attacks, yet its anxiety’s permanency demonstrates Kohli’s talent at communicating the visceral through language: 

Sometimes anxiety
feels like the only
constant in my life
for it may leave
for a while but
never permanently,
and when it reappears,
it grips me with
such ferocity
that it takes
the oxygen
out of my body.”
(45) 

We may not see her anxiety but we feel it. 

Kohli’s skill as a poet is flexed as she traverses many different emotions without losing the reader’s attention through the directness in her address. “Tribute” is an ode to the loved ones in Kohli’s life. In the last verses, Kohli proves that she does not paint men with a broad brush stroke. The verses concerning her grandfather, her brother and her lover are written with tenderness and love. For me, the poems serve a dual purpose. They are an homage to the men who showed her true love, and on a broader level are a reminder that misogyny is not a sickness, where the sick have no choice but to succumb. The tales of her brother and his love for her demonstrate that men have agency to choose love over complicit violence, and this love the author basked in: 

Having a father
who starved
me of love
and a brother
who gave it
in abundance
taught me
one of the most
important lessons
of my life.
A man is not
always defined
by the one
who raised him.”
(81) 

The final verses bring We Need To Talk full circle, with Kohli dedicating her last sonnets to her mother’s experiences dealing with the very same patriarchy and misogyny examined in prior pages. There is solace in Kohli’s words to her mother and she acknowledges that the grief she feels, her mother is not a stranger to either. 

We Need To Talk is a holistic retelling of what it means to be a young Indian woman. The ferocity in its censure of Indian society, of the reproduction of toxic masculinity, to me, comes from needing to speak the truth into existence so that these topics do not remain in the shadows. The power of Kohli’s poetry comes from interweaving the bad and the good, the light and dark, to create a complex world that is brave and truthful to the experiences of many Indian women. The poems will no doubt spark discussion and be the catalyst for inspecting how we replicate the world around us in our own relationship dynamics. We Need To Talk is a work that deserves a wide audience and pause for conversation for many years to come. 

VARUNA NAICKER is a Fijian-Indian writer from Penrith, immigrating to Australia when her parents moved from Fiji in 1999. She holds a Bachelor of Communication degree and a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Governance. Varuna has deep interest in how social institutions form people’s perception of themselves and the perception of the world around them. She has worked in various media, including film and writing.

Natalia Figueroa Barroso reviews Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías

November 23, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Pink Slime

By Fernanda Trías

Scribe

ISBN:9781922585356

Reviewed by NATALIA FIGUEROA BARROSO
 

Within the womb we are connected to our mothers by an umbilical cord. After birth, that cord is cut, but our psychological attachment remains no matter the complexities of our relationship. Under the metrics of neoliberalism, the inequalities of carbon trading and the forces of neocolonialism our connection to Mother Earth is obscured.

Peeling back the layers of motherhood and caregiving and mother earth-hood, right to the muscular tissue, multi award winning Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías’ latest sci-fi novel Pink Slime, translated from Spanish to English, by Heather Cleary is an agonisingly beautiful read. 

Written in first person peripheral, but often slipping into future tense, a nameless narrator waits for her ambiguous end, in a nameless port, in a raceless society, in a timeless era, all alone. Through this unnerving and anonymous lens, the narrative unfolds amid a bloodcurdling toxic pink algae-born disease that brings forth lethal red winds, baptised, El Principe (The Prince). Next the fish die, followed by the birds disappearing. Then the haves flee Inland while the have-nots stay behind to fend for themselves.

If anyone becomes infected by this deadly eco-superbug phenomenon their “skin cracked open to the muscle” (p. 17). The city’s inhabitants are forced into lockdown with their cans of Meatrite, “twenty grams of protein per portion, served in a plastic cup” (p. 83). This food product goes into such high demand that its processing plants spit out pink slime, the origin of the title (p. 83). However, it’s the setting’s tone and mood, where this book stands out, well, that and, its striking poetic prose. 

Although, Pink Slime is set in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic setting, it is not too far removed from reality, where the global south suffers from environmental pollution, lack of quality healthcare and economic inequality, trapping its disadvantaged citizens in crisis after crisis, directly and indirectly caused by the global north. 

Within this grim and contagious environment, Trías examines human nature, relationships and isolation. The nameless narrator ignores her body’s demands, surpassing hunger and survives by keeping herself busy. She quits her copywriting job at a content agency and dissects her days and nights among visiting the last that remain close to her, risking the kiss of death from the not so charming El Principe. 

She checks in on her bedridden childhood sweetheart and ex-husband Max, who’s been infected in a self-destructive moment and now a patient at Clinics, conveniently (and inconveniently) not too far from her rundown apartment. And lives with Mauro, a morbidly obese boy with a nameless disability that she’s paid to care for by his affluent and aloof parents, “to watch him get fat and eventually (when?) to watch him die, without feeling the pain a mother would” (p.95).

Oddly she drops in, uninvited, at her mother’s, whom she’s both estranged from, and geographically distant. Their relationship is uncomfortable, like sunburnt skin. Her mother lives Inland, up north of the (almost) nameless South American country near Brazil (p.54). I say almost because there are little clues, in particular for Latinx readers, like the insertion of the sweet, dulce de leche (p. 92), a word used in Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Ecuador and parts of Colombia and Venezuela. But the inclusion of the tart, pastafrola (p. 100), a dessert that Italian immigrants brought to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, refines the location of this book.

Cyanobacterial blooms in Uruguay’s Río de la Plata are a common occurrence. Now with climate change at our riverbanks, ever more so. And as I dive into each sensory image in Pink Slime, such as, “Unless you’ve lived it, you could never imagine the nauseating stench, the sudden heat, the river swelling like an octopus, foam tinted crimson by algae” (p.15), my mind travels back to Uruguay, January 2016, when I held a glass filled with tap water to the sunlight and found: tiny phlegm-like blue-green algae floating in my drink at my sweaty pale grip. 

This memory triggered by the novel’s atmosphere, made me wonder where Trías got the grim, but brilliant idea for her Orwellian narrative. I close its pages for a moment and google the following:

“It began with a nightmare. Night after night, I would dream about pollution spreading in waves and ripping off my skin. I would look down and see my skin hanging off me in strips.” (Trías, F. 2023, Scribe Publications)

After reading the author’s note the novel’s non-linear structure makes even more sense to me, as the beginnings and endings, and the passing of time itself are questioned throughout the story’s arc. The beginning of this book is not the true beginning of this dystopian world. As the nameless narrator on the first page declares, “I was never any good with beginnings,” and it’s not until page 154 that she redeclares, “This is how our new official story begins.”

As well there’s the motif of inhabiting a timeless world, where Trías explores living in a place where clocks and calendars are a thing of the distant past.

Take the following:

“… time was measured by a different kind of clock: wind or fog, grey or red, power or blackout; it passed according to Mauro’s cycles of hunger, the preparation of meals, and my ability to keep my distance from Max. So when I talk about days, weeks, and hours, I do it as a way to organise my thoughts, to give meaning to the stagnant memory” (p.194).

The novel’s structure flows like an unnerving nightmare. As a reader I am thrown from one timeless moment to the next, and a lot of foretelling occurs as I land in different points in this non-time within the narrative, creating a cunning sense of dramatic tension like an anxiety blistering at the face of the environmental, the viral and the emotional. 

“I was afraid the world would come crashing down around me if I stopped moving, and when I say the world what I mean is the past, because the fragile and wavering present I’d had until a few hours ago was coming to an end” (p.135).

I am hooked, even at the face of the utterly uninviting. 

Additionally, the juxtaposition of the ecological catastrophe alongside the sluggishly painful ending of the nameless narrator’s complex relationships with her mother, ex and Mauro, generates a visceral sense of an outer and inner turmoil. This is further coupled with anonymity of self, place, and time evoking an ingenious metaphor for an emotional world in crisis, which again adds to the dramatic tension. 

Hopelessness and meaninglessness are prominent themes in the plot. And the strong visual imagery that represents these ideas, in addition, become metaphors for the nameless narrator’s state of mind. Such as, when she wakes up exhausted next to Mauro, and continues doing her caregiving task mechanically and absentmindedly, and expresses how, “Sometimes I picture myself digging a long, deep tunnel to another land. But all my escape routes led me back to Max, like those circular highway exits that spit you back out right where you started” (p. 87). 

A few pages later in the novel, in another timeless moment, the nameless narrator dials for a taxi out of the port and to the Inland, and is led to an automated message with three options to press. But unfortunately, like her internal predicament she, “circled around the maze of options leading nowhere for a while …” (p. 93).  

Finally, I want to bring attention to Trías’ gorgeous poetic prose through her use of poignant similes, as they added an extra layer of skin to peel back and examine throughout the text. When describing her mother’s ironically named, country suburb of Los Pozos (The Pitts), at the non-beginning of the novel, when the nameless narrator goes to visit her, she compares it to, “It was as if the clouds formed there, exhaled by the earth itself, and you could feel the moisture on your face as slow and cold as a slug’s trail” (p. 8).

Immediately, I feel uncomfortable arriving at Los Pozos as I read this. Making me innately mimic the protagonist’s internal world in calamity via Trías’ clever use of one emotionally stirring comparison.   

I adored Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías translated by Heather Cleary, its atmosphere, its poetry, its politics, its humanity peeled back to the muscular tissue like a lab rat under the knife of a scientist, and I would be more than happy to reread it in Spanish. Perhaps by revisiting it in my mother tongue, I too could circle back to a new beginning. 

Mugre Rosa was released 5 October 2020, and its translation Pink Slime was released 1 August 2023. Follow the author on Instagram: @triasfernanda.

NATALIA FIGUEROA BAROSSO is a Uruguayan-Australian poet and storyteller of Charrúa, African and Iberian origins who lives on Dharug Country. Her work has appeared in the collections Sweatshop Women: Volume One, Racism: Stories on Fear, Hate & Bigotry, Any Saturday, 2021. Running Westward and Between Two Worlds and various literary magazines. Natalia’s currently working on her debut novel, Hailstones Fell without Rain (2025, UQP). She posts at @ms_figueroa_barroso

Nicole Smith reviews Admissions Ed David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury, Mohammad Awad

November 22, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Admissions

Ed. David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury, Mohammad Awad

Upswell

ISBN: 9780645248098

Reviewed by NICOLE SMITH
 
 

Within these pages is a cohort of activist consumers, neurodivergent creatives, psychiatric and trauma survivors, dreamers, community leaders and mind-bending writers.

I dive into Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health. A mosaic of 105 Australian voices follows, in the form of poetry, short fiction, rap lyrics, essays and illustrations. Well-known names Anna Spargo-Ryan, Krissy Kneen, Omar Sakr, Felicity Ward, and Grace Tame are anthologised with 30 emerging writers who were chosen through a 2021 MAD Poetry callout by Red Room Poetry. The foreword affirms: 

Everything within these pages is someone’s truth.

The editors pledged to approach the works in Admissions with ‘radical empathy’ imploring readers to do the same, because we are all human, regardless of mental health challenges. As Luka Lesson reminds us:

There are 206 bones in our bodies
and mine
are just like yours.

The readers are reminded of this shared humanity so that they may come to the anthology without prejudice and join the writers and editors on a mission to rid the world of stigma around mental health.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is only cited twice, demonstrating that the anthology’s interest does not lie in pathology, but in the interpersonal experience of living with such challenges.    

In the words of editors David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury and Mohammad Awad Admissions seeks to show how: 

…art and language can expiate suffering. Art as release, art as relief, art as recovery, remission, remediation.

Such words are echoes lines by Quinn Eades that evoke the complicated relationship we have with writing, and explore writing as therapy:

we are mad to write and mad to not write we carry this book for so long that it is become
un bearable

Artist and contributor, Amani Haydar’s cover image shows a woman with one eye closed, symbolising both a phobia of seeing ourselves, and a desire to be acknowledged by others.

The anthology is organised in reverse alphabetical order by surname, echoing Alice Blayney’s inclusion ‘The Z-A of Crazy’. Each piece questions and reframes stereotypes of mental illness, and associated trauma and recovery, using different tones and a vast vocabulary to regain power and convey identity.

The collection has narratives, in the first person such as Chowdhury’s ‘Motherlines’:

In our preliminary session, my first psych told me that I should think of treatment and recovery as a nonlinear path with an ever-shifting end point.;

the second person, such as Hefferan’s ‘from the book of puns and other altered sentences’:

it is twenty minutes since you took your meds Zyprexa, the communion wafer the blasphemous one instead of taking it on the tongue you take it under the roof of your mouth.;

and third person, such as Mununggurr’s ‘Point of No Return;

She closes her eyes
only starless skies, opens then
Still only darkness.

The collection explores a variety of environments and themes including the uncertainty of COVID-19, the emotional turmoil caused by intrusive thoughts, body image, growing up with a parent with mental illness, psychiatric hospital stays, face-blindness on a first date, swimming with dolphins as treatment for depression and smart ovens keeping the lonely company. This variety, while certainly part of the book’s charm, is one reason I would caution against reading Admissions in one sitting. The use of figurative language and symbolism means some lines delight in ways that can be easily missed. Here is an example from ‘The Bedroom Philosopher’:

I ran a bubble bath, it went flat
I had a falling out with myself, I’m not talking to myself anymore.

My favourite are the grounded memoir pieces, particularly those with a familial focus, for example: Kristen Dunphy struggling with a loss of control surrounding her wife’s illness and a feeling of helplessness when supporting their daughter:

When will Mummy stop being sad? She asks me. …The woman I married is no longer here. She is the ghost of her former self.

The genetic nature of mental health is referenced by Samson L. Soulsby :

Madness runs in the family like greyhounds.

Krissy Kneen continues the familial thread:

I am learning about time
from men
who look nothing like my father
who remind me of his absence.

The familial theme takes a hauntingly beautiful turn with the inclusion of a piece by Annette and Stuart Baker reflecting on their deep sorrow on the loss of their daughter Mary. The reflection is placed directly after Mary ‘s poem ‘The Key’, in which she speaks of freedom and longing to break out of a cage like a bird:

So unravel this cocoon of your protection,
Untie this chain of your love
Open the door, release me.
Trust that I won’t fly away.
But if I do, Trust that it is for the best.

The inclusion of Mary Baker as well as Benjamin Frater, two artists whose mental health battles also ended in suicide is evidence that words live on and emphasises the strength of those fighting mental ill-health.

Parts of Admissions feel frenetic, especially those written in a loud collective voice (often written in capital letters) such as Steven Oliver’s CARRY ALL THE HURT AWAY. 

The abstract nature of the poetry is admirable yet alienating. At times it feels the poetry is deliberately obscure, as I was left to infer meaning from syntax, structure and meter I’d never seen before. No doubt many of the poems are it is intelligent, and evocative, however the non-linearity meant I had to read the poems multiple times which prevented me from becoming fully immersed. One wonders I wondered if the chaotic and at times nonsensical elements are included to evoke the disconcerting nature of dissociation and ill-health ‘episodes’. For, as the anthology makes clear, although there can be a sense of pride for those with diverse brain chemistry, many wish to no longer be on the outskirts of their own lives.

Conversely, the pieces that read as inner monologues, for example, Olivia Hamilton’s ‘Time Lapse’, or have excerpts of academic text, for example, Martin Ingle’s exploration of OCD ‘A victim who feels like a villain’ are consumed with ease.

A word of caution: the book takes a candid approach to taboo topics such as sexual assault and rape that may prove confronting for some.

The contributions by First Nations writers Brooke Scobie and Kirli Saunders conjure the Australian landscape, flora and fauna, connecting it to vulnerability and emotions:

 …measured by acacia blooming, echidna trains, winds that change, moon who wanes.

Throughout Admissions, the failing mental health system, and its need for more funding is variously hinted at and explicitly stated. At times, readers could be forgiven for thinking that works are set in prisons, rather than mental health facilities. For example, KJ writes:

 Escorted to my room My packed-the day-before bag holds my hand
Inside the remnants of my sanity; 

And Jacobson:

I was not there in my self while my body
lay on the bare mattress and screamed
for my return.

However, as Jeffs reminds us:

The madwoman in this poem
is everywoman
is any woman
is a mother, daughter, sister, lover, friend –
the madwoman in this poem –
is me.

Admissions reminds all of us that as beautiful, confronting, confusing, funning, disorienting, brave, sorrowful, infuriating or joyous the experience of mental illness can be, these writers are us. These stories are, or could be at any moment our stories, and it is in all our interests to pay attention to, and improve the narratives surrounding mental health in Australia.
 
 
NICOLE SMITH is a writer with Cerebral Palsy living and working on Wurundjeri land. She has a blog where she interviews social entrepreneurs. Last year she was a Storming the City mentor with the Writeability program and ran an ‘Effective Interviewing’ workshop.

Ben Hession reviews Inland Sea by Brenda Saunders

November 20, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Inland Sea

by Brenda Saunders

Gininderra Press

ISBN 9781761091445

Reviewed by BEN HESSION

Inland Sea is the third full collection by Brenda Saunders, a Wiradjuri writer, following a somewhat lengthy hiatus. Saunders’ last collection, The Sound of Red, was published back in 2014. Her debut volume, Looking for Bullin Bullin, had won the 2014 Scanlon Prize for Indigenous poetry. Like that collection, Inland Sea, provides a particular focus on Aboriginality, although doing so via the intimate connection with Country through which the impact of colonization is also examined. The title, itself, is an ironic play on that body of water which had eluded the expectations of the English explorer, Charles Sturt. We see in Inland Sea Saunders conducting her own explorations from an Aboriginal perspective and throughout the collection, her poems are infused with energy and precision, marking a welcome return.

Importantly, Saunders is not solely a writer, but is also a visual artist, with ekphrastic poetry being a significant feature of her work generally. The Sound of Red, for instance, had seen Saunders respond to paintings by Rothko, de Chirico and Goya among others. Ironically, with ‘Reinventing the landscape’ Country is viewed through the literal and figurative framing of a non Aboriginal painter, Fred Williams. Yet, as the concluding stanzas show, there is a kind of retrieval of an Aboriginal perspective through an intensely personal response to Williams’ portraits:

I move through rooms of golden summers, smell the sun
in scumbled oils. A patch of yellow becomes a sway
of native grasses. Across a field his stunted bushes
hold the horizon against the white heat of the sky.

If I could reach out. I would follow the fence line
finger my way through a patch of scrub. Rows of acacias
in scabby dots, the stumps of trees felled after a fire.
Feel charcoal under my nails, bush crackling as I pass.
(76-7 The Sound of Red)

Arguably, for Saunders, this is a continuation of her interpretation of five portraits of Aboriginal people by Russell Drysdale, another non-Indigenous painter, in Looking for Bullin Bullin, where also, there have been acts of retrieval, with the most overt being in ‘Mother and Child’

Subtle fingers control her son ready
to leave this three-minute sketch.
Her eyes look out to a distant time
when the tribe roamed freely
out of the white man’s gaze.
(69 Looking for Bullin Bullin)

And in ‘Sketch of a girl’, as well:

She looks up, her stance demure
Uncertain under the artist’s scrutiny.
His pen scratches bold lines,
captures her image as ‘exotic other’
framed to a white man’s needs.
(70 Looking for Bullin Bullin)

With Inland Sea, the poem ‘Figures in a Landscape’ has Saunders continue this practice of retrieval, as well as re-inscribing the Indigenous history of place as she responds to Charles
Conden’s painting, Sydney Harbour:

I am not in this picture. Invisible, I fall
easily into shadow, watch the ladies walk
float as white sails on water. Ignore
the man waving from the house.

They wander, as dark clouds mass above
peer into rock pools, where we once
collected guatuma, a fishing site
of the Gadigal we still call Banarung. (67)

In ‘At the Falls’ I and II, she goes further, detailing the impact of settler presence on Country:

This is no place of wonderment or renewal.
There is no magic, no sprites to leap from
the bower. Darker forces half-revealed
hide behind the weight of water. Whispers
of ancient rites surface on shallow ponds.
Below the falls, stories of desecration
and death flow on through tribal memory. (71)

For the most part, however, in this present collection, Saunders has eschewed the white Australian filter in re-tracing identity. What comes first in the collection – and what puts these latter ekphrastic pieces into context – are the direct responses to Country that Saunders paints with vivid detail. As we see in ‘Spinifex rings’:

These creatures hide in rasping folds
of hummock grass, hunt with night vision
for invisible gnats breeding in shadow

caught off guard by a cloudy moon.

Corellas fly low over lignum bush, swing
and dip on a spinifex stalk. Sharp eyes
spy a beetle or moth in their path (10)

Here, a crisp lyricism of action highlights the vitality of Country, raising it from abstraction and affirming its essence. With the poem, ‘inland sea’ Saunders, again, focuses on a ‘micro cosmos/ teeming with life’:

Red-finned gobies
flash a miniature flame
through tiny succulents
carnivores varied as coral
wave vivid flowers
trick insects
to their water garden (12)

With short lines and sans punctuation, Saunders allows a greater sense of flux among the depicted activities. From this perspective, the inland sea reveals itself as something brimming with promise, rather than an appellation for disappointment. What this poem demonstrates also, as does ‘Spinifex rings’ and others in this collection, is a kind of Imagist restraint, with ‘presentation rather than representation’ (Jones 31) being at the fore. It is perhaps no surprise that we find in the second part of ‘bird brain’:

lovebird

captive
he kisses
chips
at his lover
trapped
in the cold glint
of mercury (48)

The direct treatment of phenomena allows the life within Country to appear as an innate language and voice within itself. Yet, Country is not solely a physical presence, as Saunders observes from the start in ‘Echidna Chasm’, it is necessarily born from the Dreaming:

She leads us through a narrow cleft
sheer walls scraped clean
with her spiny back a gorge red hot
bounces from white light to shadow
the sky a blue slit above

Rounded sockets mark her journey
the ball of a heel a trail left behind
as she rushes through mud shaping
Bungle Bungle Country (9)

The acknowledgement of the Dreaming offers a holistic understanding of place, where the land, and the world it supports, are viewed as a single entity. This is contrasted in the collection with the European empiricism and its consequent logic. In the poem ‘Dead Centre’ Saunders quotes Sturt’s observation that the ‘scrub without a break in its monotonous surface’ should be necessarily indicative of an interior coastal shore. Thereafter, she juxtaposes Aboriginal perspectives of Sturt’s expedition with those of his own. Finally, we see Sturt defeated, his thoughts pooling in an intermittent stream of consciousness:

hope

a promised sea
shimmers the horizon

a wooden boat
rides waves
of disbelief

endeavour
tests mortality
dead centre

dominion
drives every footstep
of the valiant (15)

Elsewhere, the settler colonial perspective that quantifies Country is also shown to commodify it. One of the central themes in Inland Sea is the conflict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conceptualisations of land – somewhere to find harmony within it versus exploiting its resources, especially for individual or corporate profit. In the poem,‘Inland Sea’, for example, farming competes with wildlife for water (13). In ‘Scarred Landscape’ ‘ Moving like ants, giant loaders dredge the inside out of the iron ore plain’ (16). Against this, we may compare ‘Black boys’, ‘Wild Honey Tour’ and ‘Mulga stories’. Here, in this latter poem, we can see:

He speaks fondly of this ancient tree
of many cycles yielding flowers
and seeds, a steady food always
ripe for picking. Shows us bark
easily shed for a woman’s carry-all
wood that burns brightest, cools
to a white ash, good for Ceremony (59)

The poem, ‘Red Centre’, notes with a laconic sense of humour the treatment of cultural connection as a spectacle:

Mpartntwe springs lie reflex blue in a rim of rock
From the camp nearby women shuffle red earth
Dance a mulga ant story. Amaze the drop-in tourists. (17)

The sad impact of this, however, runs deep, as does the consequent irony:

Some take souvenirs, send them back, complaining
of bad luck. The Mala woman’s grief weighs down stones
in their pockets. She sighs, finds her tchurunga stolen,

stored in a city museum, for safety and prosterity. (17)

The tension is more pronounced where, in ‘Cullen Bullen’, the violence inflicted on Country, is mirrored by that suffered by local Indigenous people:

This working mine has cut a swath for miles
worked underground ‘til the last seam is spent
Up close, I find a hill sliced in two, the cliff-face
                                  left gaping red

Remember fragments passed down. Generations
              of hillside burials, ground slaked
with the blood of Ancestors after ‘the Round Up’ (73)

The poem reflects on the attempted erasure of history and connection:

The web reports on wealthy Developers
              building roads over hunting tracks
Woodland cleared to mine the black rock
              in the name of progress

Has nothing to say on our history. First People
living, thriving here, who left without a trace
Driven off Country. Lost in plain sight. (74)

In Poor fella Country connection and erasure are particularly current concerns:

Scattered clans can no longer care for Country
Without Language, the Elders have no power
Over young ones living the white man’s dream

I see sorrow in our people sitting on Country
Wasted in spirit, they suffer, hold a sickness
inside, as mining grinds their stories away. (23)

In an article for the Writing NSW website, Saunders, herself, says she seems to have been writing for her community all her adult life. (Writing NSW) This may not have always been obvious in her previous collection, but it is certainly clear in Inland Sea, where it finds expression replete with skill and confidence. In the same article, she adds: ‘Our cultural history has survived dispossession: ties to Country continue to sustain Aboriginal people today and, as a poet, I feel impelled to write to this power.’ (Writing NSW)

The final poem of this collection, ‘Singing the land’, echoes this statement, where there connection remains, there is a vibrant continuity and an intrinsic sense of hope:

Along the quay painted Kooris
play the didge add clapsticks
chant to sell their CDs
Amplified     the music thunders
              under my feet
wakes the yidaki spirit     first music
      sings this ancient land. (81)

As we see here, the politics of identity is not without passion. This is true throughout Inland Sea. More than retrieval, perhaps, the collection is about reclaiming and a re-affirmation of Indigeneity. In this it may be viewed as a return to first principles, and articulating the voice of Country, which, despite the referendum result, as Saunders shows, will not be silenced.
 
CITATIONS

Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones, Penguin Classics, London, England, 2001
Saunders, Brenda. Looking for Bullin Bullin, Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne Victoria Australia 2012.
Saunders, Brenda. The Sound of Red, Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, 2013.
Saunders, Brenda. ‘Feature Articles/ Brenda Saunders on writing about, for and within communities’, Writing NSW, March 29, 2022, writingnsw.org.au/brenda-saunders-on-writing-about-for-and-within-communities.

BEN HESSION is a writer and critic based in Wollongong, south of Sydney, Australia. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Bluepepper, Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? Ben Hession is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.