April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work
by Edwidge Danticat
Princeton University Press, 2010
ISBN 9780691140186
Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL
What does it mean to create dangerously and what compels the immigrant writer to abandon the reflections of a poetic or fictional imagination to risk arrest, failure, deportment, death, or at the very least being isolated and ignored by the literary mainstream? In a lecture given by Albert Camus, from which Edwidge Danticat borrows the title of her recent collection of essays, the Algerian-born writer/philosopher addresses the ethical and aesthetic considerations imposed by frontiers of all kinds, and by the “crudest implications of history.” It’s hard for us in the comfort zone of the antipodes to imagine a country of such humanitarian oppression as Haiti with its history of Spanish and French colonists, slave rebellion, US interventions and enforced dictators, its natural and biological disasters. What was once the ‘Pearl of the Antilles,’ one of the richest outposts of French colonialism bears a history of complex social, political and economic mutilations, which for decades writers and artists of differing persuasions have attempted to reframe. In this slim volume, Danticat upholds and celebrates this tradition of revolt against silence by readers and writers of littérature engagée, to quote Sartre’s term, and she does this with understated elegance moving between radical history, anthropology, memoir, philosophy, moving with subtlety between the real and the surreal.
As an immigrant writer, I’m intrigued by the concept of writing as an act of risk, playing out the impossibility of contact with its subject through the slippages between fiction and non-fiction in the fractured topography of diasporic narratives. If I came to Danticat’s book for further knowledge and for inspiration, I was captivated from the opening essay with its themes of urgency and sacrifice. A chilling account follows of the public execution of Marcel Nouma and Louis Drouin in Port au Prince on November 12, 1964. Both men were writers, political activists and members of Jeune Haiti, a group attempting to overthrow “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Rather than burdening the reader with literary reportage of the officially recorded scene, Danticat focuses her lens, filtering the perspective into the present tense. Her emphasis on simple detail creates an immediate and vulnerable portrait of the assassinated patriots:
Numa, the taller and thinner of the two, stands erect, in perfect profile, barely leaning against the square piece of wood behind him. Drouin, who wears brow-line eyeglasses, looks down into the film camera that is taping the final moments. Drouin looks as though he is fighting back tears as he stands there, strapped to the pole, slightly slanted. Drouin’s arms are shorter that Numa’s and the rope appears looser on Drouin.
(3)
A choice between exile and execution existed for these renegades, both of whom, being from middle-class Haitian families had begun comfortable and successful lives in the US. This kind of alternative between separation, silence and activism, is familiar to Danticat. She describes it aptly as one of her creation myths, a moment captured in history, which her father’s generation extolled as political martyrdom.
Such a symbolic act of defiance resonates long after the firing squad have completed their task. In the poetically titled essay, “Acheiropoietos,” we learn how an adolescent Daniel Morel witnessed the event. After walking past a photographic studio near his father’s bakery the following morning, Morel noticed enlargements of Drouin’s and Numa’s corpses. Morel, now an acclaimed photojournalist, cites the event as being the causal influence behind his work.
“I’d immediately wanted to be a photographer so that I could document Haitian history,” he’d said that day….”
(139)
Like many artist émigrés, Morel has suffered both in his homeland and abroad for making visible the subaltern face of Haiti’s dispossessed. Sensitive to this precarious balance, Danticat weaves poetry and philosophical meditations with biographical details of the photographer’s personal tragedies. She turns her lens to the artist as subject, while probing a more universal fear of how it might feel to be misread, mis-seen (missing?) or misunderstood. Danticat has been exposed to censure from family as well as from the wider Haitian communities for using the singularity of a narrator’s voice to dissect private afflictions or to make emblematic a nation’s complex cultural and political grievances. In her work she shares the almost-parasitic experience of those who leave a country-in-crisis for better prospects. While she returns to memorialise, to make sense of the past, others, like her uncle Joseph and her Tante Ilyana, stay behind, to document the atrocities, to maintain the physical legacy of their ancestral home.
A sense of torn loyalties and survivor-guilt becomes apparent in many of these essays as they sketch a family tree of deceased relatives: uncles and cousins brutally imprisoned or deported by the US Department of Homeland Security. Precise and metaphoric prose infuses with the beautiful and the courageous, the guapa of Creole and Vodou beliefs. Danticat explores the divisions that arise when one is cast lòt bò dlo, across the seas, or anba dlo, under the water, where the spirits are reborn. The skilful restraint she exercises never permits a tone of self-pity or sentimentality to enter the writing so that the impact of the book is all the more potent. A cultural memory in which killings, death, and disease are so mundane, so ignored by the outside world, transcends the conservative status of realism in Danticat’s capable hands.
The reader begins, ever so palpably, to perceive the spirit of the dead, undying, as living hope for the future of this beleaguered nation. Danticat acknowledges the cultural influence of Marxist–surrealist and Negritude writers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Camus in the underground staging of plays, and in clandestine book clubs, which formed a literature of resistance during the Duvalier regime. Yet what she describes as the pleasures and dangers of reading or writing could not be compared to the fear of being tortured, killed, or living in a time or place when that could happen.
Elements of amnesia as well as cultural anamnesis are shown to characterise the “dyaspora” experience. Forgetting can be an anaesthetic, a way of protecting a country from its past horrors, its internal corruptions, Danticat suggests in “Daughters of Memory,” but the immigrant writer, is twice removed from home and past.
It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pass under the trees, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains.
(65)
For Danticat’s generation the erasures of language and enforced Francophone education had effectively suppressed Haitian literature, yet she suggests, there exists a memory of amnesia in the public and private executions of the Tontons Macoutes. Many of the essays broach deeply disturbing topics with remarkable tact, a kind of seduction by which we are convinced. In the essay which commemorates Haiti’s Bicentennial, Danticat makes seamless if necessary comparisons between overthrown president Aristide and revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, between the speeches of Negro liberty and the contradictions of Thomas Jefferson’s racist declarations, which could not “reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel.”(98) Danticat’s prose seems informed by Sartre’s notions of there being an engagement between writing and society:
One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too. And it is not enough to defend them with the pen. A day comes when the pen is forced to stop and the writer must then take up arms. Thus however you might have come to it, whatever the opinions you might have professed, literature throws you into battle.
(What is Literature)
Resisting historical reality, Danticat writes as if for the freedom of sight, her voice unburdened by modernist agendas. The Vodou ceremony of Independence marked by machetes and pig blood, and Jefferson’s crude claim of “cannibalism,” appear as bizarre historical facts. As butter is made from water, what “we have come to know as magical realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti,” (103) Danticat asserts, reminding us of Alejo Carpentier’s discovery of the real maravilloso during his trip to the island. I am reminded, too, of the French poet and Antillean anthropologist, Michel Leiris, whose writing explores the function of danger in subjectivity through tauromachic tropes. For Leiris the bullfight, represents not merely personal mutilations but the agonies of the Spanish Civil War. This dance between the shadow of the bull’s horn and the shadow of recovery from its psychological wounds is akin to a transition Danticat negotiates from fiction to essay and memoir in her two most recent books, Create Dangerously and Brother I’m Dying.
Risks are taken in the poetic motifs, which segue her prose, the flow of tropes resisting a dominant discourse. Danticat speaks in near-whispers of writing against hope, as if one is summoned or driven by acheiropoietos; she cites the artist being briefly possessed by a trance as if he or she were merely a vessel for the chwal, the Vodou horseman. She evokes alternative spatial experiences but the writing remains grounded in unbiased descriptions of personal tragedies and injustice. A cultural memory is intuited to the ghost of the Brooklyn-born, Haitian-Peurto-Rican artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of an overdose. Through his story, Danticat fictionalises the seldom-voiced identity of a mixed-ancestry migrant, by re-imagining his syncretic origins, his complex threads of cultural and artistic heritage. Yet she returns to Alèrte Bélance, a victim of the 1991 terror gangs, her own tortured words. She refrains from any summary or interpretation of what the mutilated amputee speaks. I found this chapter, “I Speak Out” to be the most harrowing prose I have read in a long time.
Danticat questions her authority to speak about the Haiti earthquake. The essay, “Our Guernica” embodies her experience of returning home to engage a self that is compelled to glance, albeit briefly, beyond the grave. She writes with a humanistic responsibility to record and reframe disastrous historical realities. Her anguish, her guilt, the self-exploitation of her writing are clearly evoked for the reader. But in this chapter she describes being gripped by the sudden fear of death. Perspective shifts are finely attuned, averting any lapse into sensational or spectator reportage. In Port-au-Prince, the muse has altered. On visiting her cousin Maxo’s grave, in the rubble of a half-collapsing church she becomes aware of the hazard to herself. Panicked, she forgets her intention to leave behind a favourite book, Genet’s Les Nègres. These subjective confessions describe fragmentation and fear yet they read as unclouded. Danticat farewells her country with fragile hope, flying back to the safety of Miami but what is experienced and described is an intimate suspension between living and dying; between the fear of dying and the fear of not being able to die.
Danticat’s essays and her memoir are highly finessed and subtle. She breaches the vertiginous fault lines between the real and the surreal, between writing and archeiropoietos, between lòt bò dlo, and anba dlo. Create Dangerously celebrates love, physical beauty, painting, music and literature of a country that defies its economic oppression and invisibility, its manipulation by media stereotypes. It asks us to consider art and literature as vehicles for authenticity and self-expression, however dangerous that might be. This achievement is effortless and utterly compelling, with not one syllable or sentiment below guapa. Under the radar of humanitarian organisations the US deportations to Haiti and the death toll from cholera, with its high infant mortality, continue to rise. Danticat brings this torn world closer to our own as she questions: “How is the world reflected in a dead man’s eyes?”
WORKS CITED
Camus, Albert. Create Dangerously, a lecture delivered at the University of Uppsala, 1957, reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995)
Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature? (New York, Philosophical Society, 1949) p 65
MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her work appears in Southerly, Jacket and Pennsylvania Literary Journal. She serves as editor for Mascara Literary Review. Vishvarūpa is her forthcoming collection of poetry.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Mary Smokes Boys
by Patick Holland
Transit Lounge, 2010
ISBN 9780980571790
Reviewed by PETER MATHEWS
Patrick Holland’s second novel The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge, 2010) has received almost unequivocal praise so far from other reviewers. While Holland does have the potential to become an important writer in the future, it must also be acknowledged that this development is still very much a work in process. One striking feature of this book, as other reviewers have pointed out, is Holland’s intimate knowledge of its geographical setting, which is reflected in his ability to write in poetic detail about the landscape of rural Queensland. This skill derives from the longstanding insight that authors write best about subjects that fall within their range of experience, and Holland, hailing from this part of the country, is able to draw dexterously from his first-hand knowledge of the places he depicts. In employing this strategy, Holland places his work in the recognizable domain of Gothic literature – the blurb on the back of the book compares this novel to Emily Brontë’s nineteenth-century classic Wuthering Heights – a genre that has found an influential new life in contemporary fiction in both American (Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy) and Australian literature, as represented by such established luminaries as Rodney Hall and Tim Winton.
Like other reviewers, I found Holland to be at his best when he is describing the beauty and rawness of the landscape. Particularly admirable are the scenes in which he attempts to convey the desolate nature of his setting, especially its utter indifference to its human occupants. In these passages there is a strange sense of sublime peace that pervades the otherwise anxious protagonist, Grey North:
Grey was alone. He swam upstream and sank into the pool beneath the cradling spotted gum root and rested his arms and let the water crash over him. He laughed to himself at this inconsequential, late-night-creek-swimming small-town life. At such times all thoughts of leaving or anything else belong to that still-distant place called the future left him alone. The world still moved slowly at Mary Smokes Creek. At the creek you took in the infinite and nameless changes in the hours, and moving at the same speed as the earth there was not that whiplash of time and the death feeling that came with hours lost unwittingly in degrees of waking sleep. At Mary Smokes Creek there was time for everything, and no desire to do anything at all. (69)
There is a pristine, existential yearning in these passages that feels both authentic and emotionally moving. Here, Grey swims upstream – symbolizing his broader struggles in life – but in his solitude he finds peace and rest. It is in these moments that the reader catches a passing glimpse of Holland’s greater potential.
Unfortunately, The Mary Smokes Boys does not fully live up to this promise, and its flaws are due, in large part, to the weakness of its characters. The novel is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman in which we see the development of its protagonist, Grey North, from a young boy who has just lost his mother to a young man trying to cope with the reality of life in a small town. It has become a staple of postmodern fiction to depict characters that are incapable of transcendence, from Bret Easton Ellis’s grotesquely irredeemable Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to the incorrigibly flawed cast of characters that appear in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. But there is a qualitative difference between these other novels, which satirize the hypocrisy behind the social rhetoric of self-improvement, and the deadly seriousness of Holland’s story, in which Grey repeatedly bemoans the misery of life in Mary Smokes without taking a single genuine step to escape or improve it. For a character imbued by the author with such emotional sensitivity, Grey’s capacity for insight and maturity is strangely limited.
While the inability of Grey to take greater hold of his destiny may be interpreted as a strategic decision on Holland’s part, a deliberate means of exploring the regressive psychology that restricts Grey’s growth into a well-balanced adult, there is no getting around the fact that one of the novel’s most glaring problems is Holland’s failure to invent characters that change and develop in the course of the story. Too often his characters strike a single, uncomplicated note that leaves no room for surprise or reversal. The major characters in the novel are painted in stark, black and white tones, especially Grey’s mother, who is portrayed as a remarkable woman, superbly talented at everything she puts her hand to:
Her father had taught her to speak Irish. She would have amazed her old aunts in that distant country she would never see. She played Bach’s fugues and sang the canticles of Hildegard von Bingen. An Ursuline nun who trained in music at the Brisbane Conservatorium had taught her. Sister Marie Hauswald said no one in Mary Smokes knew how well the girl’s voice carried the great prayers. (25)
The problem with this portrayal is not that she is a good woman, but the way in which Holland overplays these good qualities – Irene North not only learns Irish, but is fluent enough to amaze her Irish relatives were she ever to meet them; she is not only musically gifted, she is the greatest singer in Mary Smokes; her compassion, knowing no bounds, extends to caring selflessly for “Ook” Eccleston, the troubled offspring of an affair between the North’s former neighbor and an indigenous woman; she displays her unrelenting devotion to her children, which culminates in her death while giving birth to her daughter, who is also named Irene in her memory. Simply put, Grey’s mother is depicted as being so saintly that she is not believable as a real human being. This impression is reinforced by her husband, Bill North, Grey’s father, a worthless alcoholic who, in a mirror image of his wife’s fine qualities, fails to possess a single redeeming feature. The novel desperately needs a point of contrast to the predictability of its characters, and it is Grey’s failure to step into this role, even when his instincts tell him that effective action needs to be taken, that made his behavior throughout the novel seem childish and unsympathetic to me.
Such one-dimensional characters also hamstring the plot of The Mary Smokes Boys, which moves from one minor crisis to the next in an episodic manner. Because of the novel’s lack of character development, Holland has to rely primarily on external events to drive the narrative forward. Thus, the novel opens with the death of Grey’s mother while giving birth to his sister, Irene, then meanders through Grey’s wayward youth, the foolish gambling of Bill North that lands the family into trouble, and the fleecing of Grey’s nemesis August Tanner, bringing the narrative through a full circle of revenge and heartbreak. There is nothing organic about the story’s construction, and it is because of this artificiality that the reader is left with no real deep sense of tragedy, only pathos.
For all these shortcomings, there is undoubtedly a germ of potential in Holland’s writing, but for it to flower it must be tempered by an emotional restraint that mirrors the economy of his prose. While there is certainly room for a Hardy-esque reexamination of life in rural Australia in contemporary literature, the tone of disavowed sentimentality that characterizes so much of this story left me feeling cold and disconnected from the characters. What the novel sorely needed was a larger moment, if not of transcendence, then at least of genuine self-awareness on the part of its protagonist that he is trapped in a pattern of psychic regression, a note of contrast to the relentless nihilism that surrounds him on all sides. Without that moment, all the novel’s impressively lyrical passages about the universe’s sublime purposelessness, rather than providing a profound meditation on the brevity of human life, ring somewhat hollow.
PETER MATHEWS is an Assistant Professor of English at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Readings from Wheeling Motel
by Franz Wright
Produced by Daniel Ahearn, Chris Ahearn
Music by Michael Rozon, with Daniel Ahearn
Riparian Records 2009
Recorded by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
http://readingsfromwheelingmotel.bandcamp.com/
Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES
A musical collaboration between the US poet Franz Wright and Los Angeles musicians/producers Daniel Ahearn (Ill Lit) and Michael Rozon (Brazzaville, Melvins).
When I received Readings from Wheeling Motel, by Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, Franz Wright, I was immediately struck by how convincing Wright was as a reader. He does not rush a single moment, and brings a sense of assuredness to the recording, with his willingness to leave space where space is needed. Having Ahearn travel to the poet’s home in Waltham, MA to record the readings may have added to this, as the studio can be a demanding place, where budgets and schedules often hang over a performer.
The publisher notes that the original music, recorded by Ahearn and Rozon in Los Angeles, “creates a dreamy counterpoint to Wright’s delicate, deliberate lines” and “offers the rare opportunity to experience this world-class poet in a uniquely personal and direct manner.”
I agree. It is a highly personal experience, at times an unnerving one too, both musically and thematically. An extensively self-referential collection of pieces, conviction comes from a willingness to both examine and criticise the self. Even to run across the bruises at times, as in the mercenary tradition of much poetry, Wright tears through his own life and ends up sharing stunning material. “Night Flight Turbulence” is a perfect example of a personal moment becoming shared, through both its interaction with the music and the listener. The recording builds a tight space around the narrator, enhanced by heavy, reverb-drenched atmosphere, courtesy of the piano’s legato phrasing and reversed guitar. Wright’s expression of confinement is made more tangible with a word choice that is both conversational and abstract:
In the greenly-lit restroom,
I looked pretty ill, like
a vampire locked in
a confessional;
the drug had no effect
whatsoever, maybe
slightly more arctic and fearful.
Here and throughout, Wright’s voice is like an anchor, holding everything in place. The music moves around and beneath his raspy tone, never intruding, but instead supporting his imagery and deft use of metaphor and simile. At times the music almost sounds like it chills him, despite being recorded after his reading.
Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue seems comparable. Both recordings are musically cool and reflective, often pensive, or simply dark. And both voices are deep, raspy and weathered, but clear (though more so in the case of Wright). And it’s that clarity of voice that’s so frequently mirrored in his poems – “At 54” is a wonderful moment of revelation, where ‘place’ becomes everything:
And I can’t wait
to return to this chair
in which I am sitting, this
world, the one where
each object stands
for nothing at all but
its own inexplicable existence.
Listening to Wright read his poetry, I found myself at his mercy; I experienced each piece like a movie – knowing so little about what was coming next. It kept me involved in a way that was different to the page. In fact, one of the greatest challenges in writing about Readings from Wheeling Motel, is that I can only show you the words, I can’t let you hear them. And it’s important to feel the way in which the intensity of the poetry is counter-balanced by Wright’s calm, measured reading, the open, unobtrusive music. Now, when I re-read sections of the poems here, the intensity is stronger than the calm. Wright, who has battled alcoholism, addiction and psychiatric illness, is biting when it comes to the limitations of prescription therapy, as with “Paediatric Suicide”, which begins with the line:
Being who you are is not a disorder.
Being unloved is not psychiatric disorder.
This launches an attack, going well beyond defiance:
And seeing a psychiatrist for 15 minutes per month
some subdoormat psychiatrist, writing for just what you
need lots more drugs
to pay his mortgage Lexus lease and child’s future tuition
while pondering which wine to have for
dinner is not effective
treatment for friendless and permanent sadness.
Child your sick smile is the border of sleep.
The poem is one of the most beautiful and heart-rending of the collection. For as much as it is haunting, brooding and bleak, there is beauty, defiance and strength. Wright’s mix of tenderness and harsh realism weaves its way through so many poems, like “Waltham Catholic Cemetery” or one of the longer pieces, “With a Child”:
And the words
for these things are so terribly small;
and the world of those words
only slightly less mortal
than this instant of taking your hand,
of taking care to look both ways,
not to squeeze too hard, or be too aware
that no such mercy will be proffered
by a world that has no need
of words, or us.
At times it sounds like Wright is searching for and finding the right words, as if he does this ‘live’ as he reads. This space is used to great effect, such as in the list-like poem “Intake Interview,” where each line is given the room to stand alone:
Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one
else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination
of indigenous populations?
The entire recording is sequenced with space in mind. During the poems and between them, there is enough time to feel or think, between one poem and the next. The music, at times quite dramatic, though usually so understated, is transitional between pieces, but also allows the listener room to absorb the poem themselves.
The impressionistic sketches and musical fragments (arranged by a big supporting cast) comprise at the least, piano, pedal steel, nylon acoustic (on the delicate “Out of Delusion,”) electric guitar, wordless vocals. During “Day One”, a simple, hard drumbeat underscores the humour in the piece:
Good morning, class. Today
we’re going to be discussing
the deplorable adventures
of Franz Wright and his gory flute.
Just kidding.
One of the more dissonant pieces of music in the recording is from “Abuse,” which brings a silent film or saloon to mind, with an off-kilter feel, one that is a surprising but not unwelcome contrast with the rest of the collection.
“Bumming a Cigarette” follows and returns to a slow, marching tone, for one of the most harrowing moments as Wright seems to accuse himself of becoming his father, who also suffered with alcoholism and who eventually died after being diagnosed with cancer of the tongue:
And you can only armour yourself in death-wish for so long, the
blows are not muffled, it will save you from nothing;
and the idiot drive to go on, and actually be glad to go on,
keeps breaking through, ruining everything, even
this last chance for some sort of peace.
The collection does have the feel, at times, of a startling eulogy. Death features large in the collection, both its inevitability and, perhaps, its inability to be explained away by religion (“Everyone, Lord who wakes up in a cell./Everyone Lord who wakes up in the cancer bed.” from “No Answer No Why”). I came to the closing track looking for something tender, more hopeful, and “Wheeling Motel” delivers this. Settling on a reflective moment, it is framed beautifully by piano and a wordless vocal with a gospel, Amazing Grace/Great Gig in the Sky-feel, where Wright closes with an echo, subverting the famous American Civil War poem and personalising the conflict by referencing himself and his father, suggesting an ability to reconcile, to forgive:
Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.
It’s a privilege to be introduced to Wright’s work in this manner. Hearing a recording is an experience that many of us will never have. There are poets from the past whose readings are impossible to record. Contemporary poets may be prohibited, or lack the opportunity. There are so many stumbling blocks between poet and listener. But here, Ahearn, Rozon and Wright tear them down and present the poetry in a way that brings the reader, in Ahearn’s words “disorientation, transcendence, a strange peace.”
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Equal To The Earth
by Jee Leong Koh
Bench Press, 2009
http://www.benchpresspoetry.com/
Reviewed by ANDY QUAN
Poetry is both universal and specific. Its rhythms and cadences can tap into something like an original language. An image or sentence might reach deeply inside of you telling you that your understanding of the world is shared with others.
At the same time, poetry can be the most specific of experiences. The music of a poem may require it to be read with its native accent. A set of cultural, geographical or temporal references may lose a reader completely.
In this way, I find Jee Leong Koh’s first collection of poetry, Equal to the Earth, published by Bench Press, particularly interesting in how it will connect with different readers: immigrants and ex-pats, gays and straights, lovers of language and rhyme. As a gay Asian poet, living outside of the country I was born in, I feel a kindred spirit in Koh, while conscious of our differences.
Koh’s use of rhyme and formal poetic structures is one of these differences. An Australian novelist and critic, Ian McFarlane, wrote in the Australian Literary Review (3 Feb 2010): “Until quite recently rhyme was crime and sniffingly discarded from the poetry editor’s slush pile, preferably with a pair of surgical tongs.” But he proposed that “we are disposed to rhythm and rhyme”, noting Nicholson Baker’s notion “that rhyme provides poetry’s true form”.
I note my cultural bias. My Canadian peers and role models most often wrote in free verse charged with conversational rhythm. So, I’m not inclined to rhyme but was impressed with Koh’s experimentation with rhyme and form, and caught myself noting how subtle rhymes could elevate an idea into song, enlivening phrase and sentence (in the poems “Pedestrian” and “Actual Landing”), and matched at times with gentle play and humour I (“Spinoza on Love”, “Thank you, thank you”).
A few poems I thought weaker had a central idea, and rhyme, but not enough internal energy to set them alight. I wondered if the rhyme patterns were constraining the energy of language, stronger ideas and words unable to break free. But perhaps I’m biased as one of my favourite of his poems was rhymeless, an intimate lament:
we both know, my love, who is no longer my love,
we’re standing at the very edge of Long Island
but, no, neither wild nor desolate is the edge.
(“Montauk” p.79)
I prefer this voice of Koh’s, when he matches the intensity of what he is feeling with something that reaches for something that is all at once, grand, universal and specific. In a few poems, I detect a depth of emotion that is somehow dampened, almost tossed away so as not to hurt as much. A poem to his father, “What’s Left” has the themes of familial betrayal, neglect, duty and resentment, and yet I noticed more the rhyming structure, or the repetition of the “sigh”, his symbol for his grandfather. Which could be the point: an Asian stoicism rather than a stronger reaction, but the poem still left me flat. Similarly, in “New Year’s Resolution”, the narrator battles loneliness by treating it lightly and the conversational language (“your friends sincere and good-looking, sort of”) lacks charge.
I enjoyed the frank, bold narratives of the handful of sex-oriented poems (including “Glass Orgasm”, “Cold Pastoral” and “Chapter Six: Anal Sex) though as a fellow romantic, I worry for a narrator who “mistakes loneliness for love” and is excited by the sound of a man, more than any man he’s met. But lots of us poets are tragic romantics and will sense a kindred spirit in these passages.
What I was most impressed with was the first section of Equal to the Earth, “Hungry Ghosts”, in which the narrator inhabits different men from China’s history who were attracted to other men – it uses Asian imagery and ideas in ways that are not kitsch but instead playful and original and matches it with a voice that crackles with energy. (“…kings are threaded with assassins, / male favorites, butchers, turtleshell diviners…”; “…the graying calligraphy, / the bamboo ribs bound by a belt of twine and worn / by age and use.” p. 13-14)
At the end of this set of poems, unexpectedly, the narrative shifts to the present-day, where the narrator describes a simple walk and a soon-to-occur visit from his male lover. The speech is natural and truthful and charged all at once, the rhymes subtle; this voice I felt I could listen to for far longer than it lasts. I liked it also because it wasn’t reaching for a big idea or a closing line, and yet it was resonant with meaning – aging, parental acceptance, sexual identity, companionship – and in a way that is compact and perhaps more successful than the seven-part poem “Talk About New York” about a reunion with an old friend from Malaysia.
Sign me up for the next installment.
Critic John Leonard wrote in Five Bells (Autumn/Winter 2009) that poets “swim in a current of mutual encouragement” and argues for a “climate of debate” which will lead to better poetry and wider readership (p. 18). At the same time, what is exciting about younger and less established poets is a freshness of voice, an energy and enthusiasm; different than the wise, practised voice of established poets, but valuable in their own ways. So, what I’ve aimed for in this review is balance so that my praise for what I very much enjoyed in the book is made more truthful by pointing out what didn’t resonate with me. Though to each his own, I disclaim.
First books of poetry are often exciting and compelling as they introduce you to a poet’s concerns and give an idea of where a poet will go in his next book. I’ll be interested to see how Koh builds on his strengths: a light touch applied to the right topics, an openness and accessibility, strong feeling and inventive images rendered in original language. Beyond the poems as individual works, I feel a writer who is working hard at his craft, publishing widely, and excited by language.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
la, la, la
by Tatjana Lukic
ISBN 978-0-7340-4051-0
Order from: www.fiveislandspress.com
Reviewed by KERRY LEVES
Born in Ojisek, Croatia, in 1959, Tatjana Lukic studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Sarajevo, and published four poetry collections in Serbo-Croatian while she was still in her twenties. After long-brewing ethnic conflicts broke out into war in what was then Yugoslavia, Tatjana Lukic came to Australia, as a refugee with a young family, in 1992. Poignantly enough, two Serbo-Croatian-language poems of hers were translated into English for the Yale University Press publication, Cross Currents, a Yearbook of Central European Culture, in the same year.
In Cross Currents, Lukic’s poems were published with work by five other women poets from (then) Yugoslavia and the translator, Dasha Culic Nisula, identifed Lukic’s topic areas as “human relationships” and “the relationship of a poet to her craft”. Nisula did not comment on the technique of Lukic’s poems, that not only present an emotional situation, or broader life situation, through evocative details and/ or compressed but telling images, but also submit the subject matter to a detached, critical working-over. Comparison, Buddhism tells us, is always bitter; but the speaker of Lukic’s ‘Measured Units’ balances the inevitable gall (the poem closes on an image of time as “bitter honey”, dripping like water from a leaky tap) with an even-toned valuing of things-in-their-own-right, as she contrasts a poetic and a domestic vocation.
you were pregnant with a son
I was pondering comparisons
time is one
but the hours are different
your clock – a wall decorated
with a barometer, a spoon
a red box for pepper
cinnamon and salt
as a second hand
you tiptoe quickly after a man
while you quiet a child with a pacifier
I erase a title
before dawn I question: should I put a period?
you change diapers
you have your own room –
a line full of clothes
your own midnight next to your husband’s breath
from ‘Measured Units’, translated by Dasha Culic Nisula
Neither the speaker nor the object of her inquiry – sister, friend, neighbour, another self – is overtly a winner or loser; the poem leaves it to the reader to make such judgements, according to need and/or desire. One of the mysteries of the translation is whether the Serbo-Croatian for the English word “period” – denoting the punctuation device – also connotes menstruation. This ambiguity tends to leave ‘Measured Units’, good as it is, floating in a kind of bi-lingual limbo or fog. No such difficulties attend Tatjana Lukic’s new poems, all written in English.
After arriving in Australia, Lukic worked as a researcher and data analyst for various government departments, mostly in Canberra, according to some circumstantial evidence.
east row, mort st, canberra
it started just at the time of morning tea
‘no sugar for me’, one of the fleshy gods said
and emptied his spoon over concrete land
‘it’s snowing!’ at one dash
we all left our desks
and rushed to the windows
‘open, sesame, open!’
just to catch a flake
and we’ll behave well again
staring at the screens till dark
‘open now, it’s snowing!’
but there is no magic fit enough
to move the glass walls of our cell
one by one
we walked quietly back
to our chairs
and dialled
a dear one
‘it’s snowing, darling, open the window!’
recorded all answering machines
across the lake
la, la, la shows that Lukic’s technique, of which a reader gets tantalising glimpses in the Cross Currents selection, proved transferable into her new tongue. Lukic’s poems join an expressionist impulse – and a warm emotionality – to a disciplined consideration of the place, weight, value of emotion as it “looms” in the world’s “small things” (quotes here are from the book’s epigraph, taken from Euripides’ Ion). The result is surprisingly satisfying, as the “small things” that the poems attend to are actually made to connect with history. The poem ‘1959’ manages this with enviable simplicity and magnificent found surrealism. The poem launches, almost all-at-once-together, a new-born child; the Cuban Revolution; the first marketing of Barbie; a hit pop song (Rocco Granata’s Marina); the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary; and the great Australian post-war immigration boom, as if all the above were so many helium balloons with different faces.
war was freezing in the air, everywhere
lost in a purple patch of a magic land,
the grapes were ripening
when i slipped into the world
before i had time to cry
the red dust swept the olive green
off havana’s streets
the winds were playing over the seas
with a bunch of new flags of all colours
above freed lands
at the back of his new weatherboard cottage
down under, in yarralumla, where the world will end,
a young settler, an italian builder, was planting an olive tree
the earth was circling slowly
getting its strength
what for?
even a gipsy searching a baby’s palm
could not guess
from ‘1959’
Lukic goes in less for knock-out-one-liners, than for the whole poem as multi-dimensional construct. The critical distance that the poems practise towards even the most touching or tender life experience, nudges the reader into the sense that a poem, regardless of its tonal intimacies, is an artificial thing, a feat and also a fiction. The speaker of ‘to a reader’, from the final section of la, la, la, is upfront about this:
how simple it is to trick you, you dear sitting duck
a diddler master takes you for a ride just like that,
a snake in the grass, from time immemorial
grinning at your silly bookish trust
from ‘to a reader’
Perhaps this verbal flaunting and taunting merely shows that flamboyance does not begin or end with Kylie Minogue’s galactic hairdo and mirror-panel dress. Lukic’s subtler showiness makes room for wit aplenty.
fallacy
he eats roots and leaves
and that’s fine as he eats well
and then quietly walks away
this is not what i complain about
but why like a wombat?
his dull depart is saying
i would and i would not
leave you darling
or: yes i am leaving with no doubt
but see it’s not so easy for me to slide out of
this warm burrow onto loose tracks
or: i am leaving now my love
but you have a very good chance
to catch my leg and turn me back
and if you don’t
it’s not my fault
when our story comes to its tearful end
or: i am not leaving in fact
oh i never do that
i’m just sniffing out a rooty soil
while walking around
what is he trying to tell me
a chubby eater
sneaked into the myth
where i prefer to see the elegant
speedy wings
of a flying beast?
la, la, la is structured around the changes in Lukic’s life. The first section, ‘there’, is mainly a recollection of a Serbo-Croatian past, personal and historical; the second section, ‘here’, from which ‘east row’ and ‘fallacy’ come, offers broad-brush social description of Australian life; the third and final section, ‘anywhere’, contains the book’s most ambitious writing.
Lukic’s expressionism is not trapped in a box of style: it connects with others, remakes itself. ‘anywhere’ includes poems dedicated to Australian poets that Lukic encountered when she started writing again and was once more getting poems published, both here and overseas. Joanne Burns, Margie Cronin and Laurie Duggan are dedicatees of three of the book’s most unconventional offerings. Each is a prose poem: ‘crater’ (for Cronin) begins by associating the great, passionate Chilean Pablo Neruda with “turning fourteen, rosy and tender, each monday falling in love forever”. But Lukic’s speaker provocatively asks herself/ her reader: “how could i possibly love what everyone does”:
nobody ever borrowed this tome? i will, and i will fall in love with these oddballs and dudes, a moment i turned to my side of the bed, my russian lovers were shooting themselves in the head, quiet French men, holding me like a champagne glass and sucking my tongue, gazed at the time past behind my neck…
from ‘crater’
The speaker honours her sense that she is “turning fourteen for ever”; then turns the direction of the poem towards the internet, to a “petition for a crater on mercury to be named for neruda”, and to Margie Cronin, in a display of verbal fireworks that mingles postmodern playfulness and a fiercer, perhaps more durable modernist commitment to making it new. Managing a generous homage to Margie Cronin’s own complex and versatile poetics, ‘crater’ equally makes it new and plays. The prose works for Laurie Duggan and Joanne Burns likewise engage with the ways in which these writers actually write.
It may be hard for any reader to decide whether ‘there’ or ‘anywhere’ contains the most poignant writing. The first poem in the book presents the “la, la, la” title phrase as what a young mother, walking her baby in a stroller, sings to entertain/ reassure the child in a war, while bombs drop in backyards and an unknown man is seen for the first time “coming out of wires with a bullet in his chest”.
what did i sing?
about a cloud and a bird,
a wish and a star,
la la la,
yes, nothing else
from ‘nothing else’
The book’s final poem, ‘reverse’, takes up the “la la la” phrase in the context of a pleasant but coolly disengaged encounter, lunch in a peaceful land.
when the coffee arrives after the meal
we will sigh and talk about the weather
a lovely day, we need rain
la la la
i will nod and gaze
behind your shoulder
where are you?
i am here,
licking my cream
licking my sugar
nothing else
That last line sounds the note of solipsistic finality: in peacetime or war, there is no escape from the solitary confinement of self. Yet how lightly the point is made, with a flirtatiousness that mocks, even defies the rather scary recognition embodied in “where are you?”
The book’s final poems are also Lukic’s last: ‘thinking in months’ writes the aftermath of a pessimistic diagnosis.
life was like a tiny colouring book, short and sweet,
returning now to a black and white fight,
the evil cells and the good cells, a simple story
before a long sleep, the only war on terror i am in
from ‘thinking in months’
Tatjana Lukic, a poet of the inner life, but also of the ironies that attend the mind’s to-ing and fro-ing between a given world and a private view of it, has built, using English words, a testament to her life; it is spacious, generous, and as full of joy as it is of sorrow. Lukic’s distancing techniques – her multiple ways of opening a lyric poem to participation in a big, un-lyrical world – relate her to the great Central European poets of an earlier generation, to the Polish Zbigniew Herbert and the Czech Miroslav Holub; perhaps Bertolt Brecht is a common ancestor. We can regret that Lukic is gone, but rejoice that her book takes its place among some of the best cross-cultural poetry written in Australia, alongside the very different poetics of, for instance, Ali Alizadeh, Kim Cheng Boey, Ouyang Yu, Ania Walwicz and the Vietnamese-Australian Xuan Duong.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Eighth Habitation
by Adam Aitken
Giramondo Publishing
Poetry, Paperback, 144pp
ISBN 978-1-920882-46-4
$24.00
Publication April 2009
Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY
In “The Photo,” the concluding poem in Eight Habitation, the traveller-poet who has journeyed from the safe and familiar precincts of Sydney to the ravaged landscape of Cambodian history, poses a question: “To forget or not to, / to write or not to – therefore live – / to forgive the monster/ is this impossible question.” In parodying Hamlet, Aitken does not merely revisit the Theodor Adorno proposition about poetry being an impossibility after Auschwitz, but also broaches the role of remembering that Milan Kundera has framed so memorably: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Eighth Habitation is a project in remembering; it revisits a personal and familial past, and then turns to the barbaric years of the Cambodian killing fields. The collection confronts the unspeakable without the false portentous gravitas that many bring to the subject; it does its work of remembering and witness with sensitivity, grace, humility and honesty, offering compelling records of the atrocities and sufferings in one of the most horrific nightmares of recent history.
But to suggest that Aitken’s cogent, rich and varied collection is merely an addition to what Carolyn Forché calls the poetry of witness is to miss its many other resonances, its arresting range of subjects and tone. Doubtless the core of the collection revolves around Atiken’s Cambodian sojourn and is shadowed by the country’s violent history, but there are other vital thematic veins to the work, not least of which is the story of Aitken’s father. In fact, Aitken’s father’s Asian adventures in the first part of the collection prefigure and frame his son’s Asian sojourn. The book begins at home; the first of the triptych, aptly called “Broken/ Unbroken,” puts together a family portrait, albeit fragmented, mythologising a father whose exploits echo the colonial figures Aitken examines in the Cambodian section. The father poems recall “the salt ghost” who left home when Aitken was thirteen, retracing his career in the army, and his travels through Asia in the 1950s. “The Fire Watchers: A Memoir” address the poet’s brother but tells of the family’s disintegration, and his mother burning all his father’s books. Out of the ruins of the family, Aitken has salvaged photographs, and “the narratives refine themselves with each passing year.” He follows his father as he “bargained with a waif at Changi/ for 13 postcards” and recreates his antics as he “danced, quite pissed, in women’s lace/ then swapped the Major’s lucky digger hat/ for a set of Dutch clogs.”
In “Archive” Aitken reconstructs his father’s Asian travels in the form of a travel journal. The son takes on the father’s voice here, giving a shorthand account of his encounters. Here Aitken senior is portrayed something of a ladies’ man; the poem is strewn with allusions to dalliances with local women, like Eleanor Kwong, “a commercial artist at Cathay Ltd,” Noël Bulke, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the Pakistani Ambassador, Edith Atkinson, “daughter of a Thai-Malaysian and Dutch mother,” a host of taxi dancers and “Singapore models.” Charming, irresistible, Aitken’s father seems interested in the East only as a site for sexual fantasy/ adventure, and cares little for Asian culture and politics. But this Orientalist exterior belies a complex mind and history, the flamboyant representations ironically hinting at a father whose contradictions the son is trying to apprehend without judgement.
Aitken senior’s adventures pave the way for his son’s Asian journey in the next two sections, his imperialistic/ colonial attitude contrasting with his son’s more sensitive explorations. Also, the hybrids that Aitken senior flirted with reflect his son’s complex make-up. Aitken, like Edith Aitkinson, is a hyphenated person, the product of an Anglo-Australian father and Thai mother; a diasporic childhood lived in London, Bangkok and Malaysia has resulted in multi-locale attachments and a shifting and complex sense of belonging. It is perhaps a need to articulate and affirm his transnational identity, to connect the Asian, and Anglo-Australian strands that impels the journeys in the collection. To this end the poems in the transitional section “Crossing to Lake Toba,” located in Cairns, Malaysian Indonesia, can be seen as metaphorically and geographically negotiating the liminal spaces between Australia and Asia. “Kuta Diary” reverberates with the Bali bombing and “For Effendy, Emperor of Icecream” is a tongue-in-cheek look at Wallace Stevens, globalisation, tourism, and the interaction between tourist and native: “And home we went to ‘Saving Private Ryan’/ on your new DVD.” Beguiling, observant, these poems reveal Aitken’s attentive eye for details and the nuances of cross-cultural interaction, his natural warmth and empathy, his aliveness to the Other, and a quiet humour that offers a light counterpoint to the heavier themes. “Cairns,” the last poem in this section, provides an engaging portrait of Aitken’s mother, giving her a voice as she recounts her migrant story. Aptly her Thai origin steers the collection to the ravaged landscape of Indochina in the next section.
The Cambodian poems grapple with wreckage left by years of war. “A Map of Cambodia” gives a synoptic survey of the country’s traumatised history and scarred landscape: “Magenta for bombed areas, /beaches named after hotels/ islands sold off to foreigners.” In quick effective strokes, Aitken captures the tide of changes sweeping across Phnom Penh, the signs of the nouveau riches, the gap between them and those still in the grip of poverty and the aftermath of war. He captures the precarious balance between destruction and recovery tellingly; while the capitalist developments, the multinational takeover of Cambodia betoken healing and movement forward, in reality they constitute a neo-colonialism that is partitioning and destroying the country in ways not different from the plunder of French colonialism. A new Cambodia is rising from the ashes of the past, eager to forget the past and embrace its capitalist future: “Under one map there’s another/ rising on the tide/ as the pain recedes.”
Aitken possesses a photographic eye alert to the telling instants and details. “Ruins” gives revealing snapshot:
In Phnom Penh a mountain of junked bicycles
is a monument to Welcome!
but Siem Reap’s giant preying mantis
toting an AK-47
at the Foreign Correspondents Club
counts as art.
Casual, understated, the observations get to the heart of the matter with arresting vividness: “Here, cows know more about road safety/ than townsfolk selling photocopied/ books on genocide.” Even clichéd images of the Vietnam War can attain cinematic clarity:
A woman sheltering under a rattan mat
from a thunderous downdraft of Hueys
by the banks of the Mekong
her last recollection of home.
In “S21” Aitken gives a virtual tour of the genocide museum where the Khmer Rouge exterminated 20 000 men, women and children. Unflinchingly the poem delivers the images in all their stark brutality:
Blood and rust melded together
in the springs of an old French style bed base.
An old cartridge case shit can.
Samplers of jumbled DNA,
in a room of ragged cast-offs.
The fragmentary images address headlong twentieth-century life in extremis; the connection between the two holocausts is inserted subtly: “Someone who’d been to Belsen/ had written ‘Justice’ in the visitor’s book.” Aitken lets the artefacts stand as evidence for what happened, avoiding the pathos and sentimental catharsis that popular representations of Holocausts like Schindler’s List peddles.
In perhaps the most powerful of Cambodian poem, “The Wearer of Amulets,” the poet meets “an old boy soldier” who reveals the secret of how he survived with the help of an amulet: “a desiccated human foetus/ cut from the uterus of a woman/ pregnant three months.” Here again Aitken reveals an ability to weave splintered lyric narrative and social observation. There is an engaging sense of kinship and empathy with the survivors, a respect for what the poet can perceive but not understand. Other memorable poems in this section include “Dear Henri,” which offers a critique of French colonialism in Indochina, “Pol Pot in Paris,” which suggests again the tenuous line between culture and barbarism, and the memorable “The Photo” that this review began with.
Eighth Habitation, as the title suggests, is a sojourn in purgatory, a journey through liminal zones where questions of self, the past, pain and suffering find expression in poems of lyric grace and compassion. If there is any flaw at all, it is its generosity in offering so much; one feels that there are a few poems that could have been omitted to make a more compact and coherent collection. But the reader shouldn’t complain; it is a rich collection that yields many pleasures and insights upon re-reading. The poems conduct their quest, ask the necessary questions in an honest, unpretentious, intelligent, self-effacing way; they inhabit and explore difficult thematic territories and have much to communicate to us of the complexities of travel and cross-cultural communication, of a fascinating family history, and of the ineffable experiences of loss, death, and healing.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
What Came Between
by Patrick Cullen
Scribe, 2009
ISBN: 9781921372889
$27.95
http://www.scribepublications.com.au/
Reviewed by MARIA FREIJ
Patrick Cullen’s first book, What Came Between, explores the life of three families in Laman Street, Newcastle in the aftermath of the 1989 earthquake, and following another incident with earth-shattering consequences for the community: the closing of the BHP steelworks ten years later. These life-changing incidents provide the framework for Cullen’s twelve interconnected stories, some of which have previously been published in Best Australian Stories, Sleepers Almanac, and Harvest. Cullen’s stories feature individuals at different stages in life and offer us an insight into the existence of very different characters, whose lives are, in one way or another, in a stage of turbulence, tragedy, or change. The earthquake becomes a trigger; cracks appear in the walls where no cracks used to be, or were they always present? The feeling of slippage runs like stormwater through the stories: involuntary childlessness, ageing, love, secrets, and guilt bob under the surface like the whale calf in Newcastle harbour, which, inevitably, is in for disaster when he crosses the surface. For the characters, the secrets and concerns continually approach the surface, but since what lies beneath will bring suffering if brought into the light, much remains necessarily and frustratingly suppressed.
Cullen’s characters are Carveresque in their working-class roots and minimalist depiction. Cullen eloquently balances the line between that which is spoken and that which must remain unsaid, showing great restraint in his narration. Newcastle features as a prominent character in the story as the city itself provides the ground upon which these characters have built their lives. When it is literally shattered, they lose their footing and their unravelling is inevitable:
Sarah got up, dragged a chair over beside the wardrobe, and reached up and ran her hand over the wall.
‘This wasn’t here before,’ she said, tracing her finger along a crack. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’
Paul stirred and looked up. ‘It’s always been there.’
‘Well, it’s opened up some more now. I’m sure of it.’ (p 7–8)
For Paul and Sarah, the earthquake is the beginning of a falling-apart in many ways. Just the one crack—and yet, a wealth of secrets trickle from the past into the present. Their childlessness, Paul’s previous life, and Sarah’s illness make for an intriguing depiction of the life of an ordinary yet extraordinary couple. Paul’s breakdown, though neatly restrained, means he takes time off work, his focus turned to repairing what the earthquake has shattered. As he retiles the bathroom, he is able to reconstruct the physical order of his and Sarah’s life. Still, the foundations he is trying to recreate will inevitably be affected by the lies he insists on telling his wife.
For Ray and Pam, as the closing of the steelworks leads to the suicide of an old friend, the unravelling of old lies creates a fear of loneliness and abandonment. The emotional turmoil is subtly depicted, yet the dialogue rings true: ‘Please don’t ever leave me,’ Ray says in the night, his face buried in his wife’s hair. When Ray falls ill and his estranged son returns from Sydney, some of the most human of emotions—guilt, fear, and pride—truly come to the fore, and the proud behaviour of both father and son yields to something more important as love, yet again, is proven stronger and more important.
For the young man whose grandmother, in her old age, moves from her house in Laman Street to stay with her daughter in the countryside, Newcastle is a new beginning. Indeed, his luggage is lighter than that of the street’s other inhabitants. When his young girlfriend falls pregnant, they start a new life together in the Laman Street home, and its previous owner, somewhat surprisingly and disappointingly, never features in the story again. This couple, representing the possibility of change and rejuvenation, seem less credible in actions and reactions; but this is perhaps because of the vigour with which these young people go about their existence and this, in turn, due to their youth. Still, because of the ease with which their troubles are resolved, these two characters appear least realistic: their relationship seems at threat, by the ominous owls in the attic if not by their innocence, but their love persists against the odds. It seems that in a time of chaos and uncertainty, love is still a force to be reckoned with.
Cullen’s characters’ lives are beautifully reflected in the movement around them: ‘Fruit bats crashed into the fig trees, and flapped and fought and fell away to do the same thing further along the street.’ (p 55) Cullen creates a fantastic ambience through the depiction of the city and his wonderful detail: the ‘small red figs pinballing about beneath their feet’ (p. 155) mirror the microcosm he has built, its characters at the mercy of the larger forces at hand: by the ocean, with its sprinkling of coal ships on the horizon, his characters grow apart, and come together. Cullen’s use of light and shade, in combination with the vulnerability of the characters towards the elements and nature: the earthquake, the tree roots growing into the pipes, along with these people’s love for each other and their instinct to defend their marriages, relationships, and lives make for a compelling and engaging narrative that resonates far beyond its last page.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Between Stations
by Kim Cheng Boey
Essays, Paperback, 320pp
ISBN 978 192088 2501
Giramondo (September 2009)
Aus $24.95
www.giramondopublishing.com/index.html
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG
Kim Cheng Boey is a writer and poet who migrated to Sydney with his family from Singapore in 1997. One could call him a migrant writer. Between Stations, according to one book-description that I read online, is “his first collection of travel writing.” But such a description says very little about a book that is all about the personal and existential crisis of a writer trying to reconcile disparate cultural worlds, as well as one trying to come to terms with his past.
Beginning in India, then passing through the evocative worlds of Egypt and Morocco, Boey’s accounts of sojourns in far-flung places in the world are full of gritty anecdotes about fellow-travellers and impassioned references to famous works of art, music and literature used to magnify and universalise the writer’s constant wanderlust. As a Singaporean, I feel a connection to this ex-Singaporean’s desire to disappear into foreign spaces that resist the vicissitudes of change which are still essential to our tiny country’s survival today—as a Singaporean tells Boey at one point, “Changes are necessary. Singapore is too small. We have to move forward.”
It is easy to see why this desire prevails. The places that Boey escapes into are imbued with an imagined sense of timelessness; they are full of history, art and spirituality. What can Singapore boast of except that it has managed to succeed as a viable and prosperous nation state in just a few decades? Using photographs of long-gone locations and recounting memories about spending time in now-demolished buildings such as the Stamford Road Library, the author reveals how he is rendered distraught by change. Yet he is also quick to remember that a longing for things to be still and for the past to remain the past can be a pointless, self-indulgent exercise. In a chapter about Change Alley, a centre for corporate culture in Singapore, the writer feels “chastened” when he notes how retirees have adapted “so easily to the new Singapore.” He wonders if “the problem is me…I have never been able to be at home in the present; the only place I can feel at peace in is the past.”
A fear of the past disappearing is tied to memories of a father’s abandonment of his responsibilities. A chapter can set off from an exotic location, rich with historical significance and framed within celebrated philosophical perspectives—think Walter Benjamin on memory or Susan Sontag on the photographic image—or aligned with quotations from influential works of literature by the likes of Cavafy or Du Fu. Then the writing segues repeatedly into a memory from the poet’s childhood, full of authentic smells and sounds, in which a grandmother is cooking for the family, or in which a father is taking a walk, or a smoke, with his son. The essays turn increasingly philosophical and poetic during such shifts. They are particularly heartbreaking during moments when Boey sees himself in his own son; in such instances, the poet also sees himself as his own departed father through his child’s eyes. Past, present and future collapse, which was what the author had hoped for all along—to unify what is lost with new memories forming in the midst of the present.
Boey’s fans in Singapore would be glad to learn of the psychological and emotional back-story behind his poems, a few of which are quoted in the chapters. I was personally gripped by the author’s experiences as a counsellor in a local prison, as well as the time when he followed in the footsteps of Mother Theresa’s nuns in helping the poor. The poet-as-restless-traveller has become more three-dimensional to a reader like me who has followed his work since my junior college days. A sense of urgency grips the eponymous last chapter (“Between Stations”) when the writer tell us that as both emigrant and immigrant, he has become “adept at switching between codes:” “You become Kim Cheng Boey instead of Boey Kim Cheng…Kim Boey is accommodating…while Boey Kim Cheng has begun to try to find a way back to the old world…He is still searching for a language to utter himself into being.” Such urgency emphasises the schizophrenic state that the writer has been struggling to resolve throughout this book, particularly when this collection of essays is aching to a close.
The book ends on a plane in which the writer’s daughter is poking him awake while his son announces “Singapore” over and over. On this aircraft that is hovering symbolically and literally between stations, “between home and home,” the author longs to “dwell in an autonomous state, a resting place between memory and imagination.” In this same instant, we as readers, regardless of whether we are Australian, Singaporean, or something in between, cannot help but long for such a place too.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Autographs
by Alex Skovron
Hybrid Publishers
ISBN 978-1-876462-60-4
Reviewed by CAMERON LOWE
Autographs, Alex Skovron’s fifth collection of poetry, is a welcome addition to an already well-established oeuvre. Unlike Skovron’s novella The Poet (2005), which was burdened by an unconvincing narrative, the fifty-six prose poems that comprise Autographs are a return to his strengths. Most notably, these poems dwell on the seductions of time and memory, imaginings of the past within the present, and importantly, how these imaginings shape notions of self-identity. Although these poems display the distinct influence of Borges, they carry (to make a fairly lame pun on the collection’s title) Skovron’s own signature.
Having already mentioned Skovron’s novella, it is interesting to contemplate why these ‘prose’ works succeed in a way that The Poet—at least for this reviewer—did not. While these pieces appear, at least formally on the page, to be works of prose, their rhythm and imagery are more closely aligned to ‘poetic’ language. Although such distinctions can be arbitrary and misleading—and on a theoretical level possibly quite meaningless—it is hard not to feel that poetry is Skovron’s form, the genre in which his writing is most ‘alive’. Structurally, what these prose poems allow is a freedom from the linear narrative that characterised The Poet. Rather, the various thematic concerns already mentioned appear in Autographs as recurring motifs, giving the collection a fractured unity.
Autographs is in many ways an extended meditation on the past, a past that is always carried with us, where memory ‘caresses the hidden contours, moments which lived and died, and survive as a chorus of ghosts’ (p36). One of the inherent dangers in this emphasis upon the past, particularly when employing personal memories, is that the writing falls victim to nostalgia. Skovron is clearly aware of this potential pitfall and avoids it by making nostalgia itself one of the thematic concerns of the collection. In ‘Key’ this ambivalence toward personal recollection is directly addressed:
Don’t know why but I keep coming back to those glittering frames, perpetually rewinding the film. OK, call it nostalgia—that glorious pang somewhere between diaphragm and heart. I know I must seem preoccupied with nostalgia. (p31)
And later in the poem we are given an insight into these meditations upon the past, this summoning of childhood memories as a way, perhaps, of coming to terms with self: ‘Because childhood never really ends; it’s morphed into a future it must fill, a replica locked against itself. The key is lost, but you can feel it glinting there, deep within’.
Skovron appears to share Bachelard’s fascination with the poetics of space, so that many of these recollections of the past involve remembered places. A number of poems in the book’s second section, ‘Labyrinth’, such as ‘Room’ and ‘Chamber’, ‘Village’ and ‘Parks’, evoke the rooms and places to which memory faithfully returns, even if the narrator of these poems is aware that ‘some of the details are not quite correct’ (p32). ‘Village’, perhaps, best exemplifies this vivid imagining of place:
Ride down into the village heart, past the cinema screening Cousteau’s marks, where strips of discarded film lie about for small boys to skim. Wheel left into the main stretch, where the buses from Haifa stop, with snub noses, diesel perfume, lever-controlled doors. Past the hardware store with its gadgets, buckets and tools, the shopkeeper couple, your neighbours, whose bespectacled daughter is the friend who will forget you. Past the playground nook where you slipped between the spokes of a carousel, cracked your skull, cried bleeding all the way home. (p 26)
Many of the poems in Autographs possess a haunting quality that lingers long after you’ve returned the book to its place on the shelf. ‘Possession’, the second piece in the collection, is one such poem. Superficially, the poem is the story of a young boy who sees a similarly young girl holding a balloon:
The boy catches sight of the blue balloon. He is standing in the courtyard of a museum. He watches the girl who possesses the balloon. She bounces it along the asphalt, rolls it on the grass, bumps it into the air. The blue balloon fills the sky as it rises and dips. The boy is mesmerized by the balloon, he would like to possess one just like it…from that moment he can think of nothing but the blue balloon. (p4)
While this passage evokes a kind of childlike innocence, a sense of naïve wonder—and it should be said that nothing later in the poem explicitly disrupts this reading—there is a distinct feeling that other, less innocent emotions are surfacing here. The setting of the poem in a museum, with its ‘antique toys and artefacts, illuminated manuscripts, quaint instruments of music, replicas of weapons, photographs of notorious battles, a model torture-chamber, an ancient sarcophagus with its lid ajar’ is perhaps suggestive of a larger historical scope to this seemingly simple poem. There is a sense we are playing out something that has occurred before, something intrinsically human. Or, perhaps more pertinently, something intrinsically ‘male’, for the boy’s ‘delicious dream of the balloon’ may also be heralding the awakening of male desire and its less innocent aspects. Importantly, the poem leaves itself open to varied interpretations, allowing the reader to imagine this scene on a number of layers.
While this textual layering works admirably in ‘Possession’, in some cases it seems somewhat contrived. ‘Neighbours’, for instance, which portrays a petty, yet long-running dispute between neighbours (and appears to be a metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is a little too cute, despite the sardonic humour: ‘In end, after we’d invested our best, sullied utterly each other’s abode—it stopped. They stopped, we stopped (I forget who began) (p13).
The final section of Autographs, ‘Shadow’, introduces us to the fictional character Kezelco, perhaps an alter ego figure to the narrative voice of the previous section. In many of these poems Kezelco acts as a kind of dislocated commentator on contemporary society, in part a participant and at the same time partly remote from ‘things he will never understand’(p41). In ‘Threshold’, where Kezelco purchases a replicant girl, we are treated not only to a fine example of Skovron’s sense of humour, but also a sharp observation on society’s fascination with the superficial:
The skin seems so alive—her flesh virtually glows, pulsates under his touch. He pulls back; scans the instructions in the operating manual, discovers wondrous secrets. Breasts subtly resizeable (‘pert, pleasingly nippled’); eyes digitally tuned (‘photoresponsive, with tracing focus’); the skin resilient (‘firm but not unyielding’); limbs and joints fully flexible, the hands miraculous (fingers ‘autonomous but utterly compliant’); buttocks immaculate (‘warm, superbly furrowed’); the mouth a marvel (lips ‘rich and creamy’, tongue ‘correctly moist’), programmable for gentle suction and/or sound…Kezelco feels he can grow to love this woman. (p59)
In counterpoint to Kezelco’s eccentric musings, ‘Shadow’ also features a number of poems that possess a disturbing, more threatening tone; or, to put it differently, these poems exhibit a sweeping, almost cosmic scope, one that challenges our perceptions of ‘human’ significance. ‘Fermata’ captures this beautifully:
And so the clouds dissolve, the old monuments crumble away, the children laugh at us, creaking in the wind; and December comes, dancing in the afternoon breeze. The light changes, time slithers to a stop, inhales, turns back on itself and is gone. Nothing has really altered, yet the world will never be the same. (p52)
Autographs is an impressive collection by an accomplished poet. One of the great pleasures of this book is not simply reading it but re-reading it, for it is a collection that rewards returning to. Skovron’s achievement in Autographs is to have crafted poems that are at once intimately personal and yet reach beyond this to offer a mysterious vision of the world.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Rofel G. Brion, Ph.D. is professor of interdisciplinary studies, literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University. Baka Sakali. Maybe by Chance, his first book of poems, won the Philippine National Book Award in 1981; he has published two more poetry collections since then. He has been fellow at various literature and writing festivals, among them the Berlin International Literature Festival (2005) and the Mildura Writers Festival (2009).
When I was in grade school, I would wake up in the middle of the night and ask either my mother or my father to sleep beside me. I knew what frightened me. I was afraid one of them would die. I was afraid I would die.
Even in college, I would take the bus home and be scared that I would perish in an accident, or I would come home and see either my father or my mother in a coffin in our living room. Sometimes I even imagined a friend’s funeral. Or mine. Who would be there? Who would cry? Would anyone be happy? Would anyone wish they had died with me?
I’m afraid death fascinates me.
Maybe it’s because death has come too often to greet me.
But part of me dies with every death I see.
And that part I now try to recover with these stories.
LOLA GUELANG, 1964
I imagine her supervising my birth, Lola Guelang, my mother’s mother. I was, after all, born on her bed. It was the only bed in the house my parents had built a year before I came. My coming was quite an event, I am told, and I see Lola Guelang telling the midwife what to do when she couldn’t get the placenta out. They had to call in Mamay Dudoy, my father’s uncle, our family doctor, who ran from his house two blocks away. He had stood as principal sponsor at my parents’ wedding. A few months before that, Lola Guelang had fainted when she found out that there would be a wedding. She didn’t like my father then because she had heard that he gambled. After the wedding, however, she saw how hard he worked when she allowed him to take over her rice dealership, a business she had began by trading rice from Bulacan, her home province, to San Pablo, my father’s home town, and had single-handedly turned into the largest rice store in the San Pablo public market. And when my father asked her to move in with them in the new house, Lola Guelang declared to everyone that she had found a new son.
She always liked drama, my twice‑widowed Lola Guelang, even when it wasn’t her own. Every morning we listened to soap operas in the only radio in the house; this, of course, my father put in her room. So I stayed in Lola Guelang’s room all the time, watching her comb her long, grey hair, mend her kimonas, or cry over the fate of her soap opera heroines. When I was old enough to read, she listened to my stories about my comic book heroes as I pretended that I was swimming on her bed.
It was a large bed with a very firm mattress, perfect for diving from the windowsill. I did that over and over again the night they took Lola Guelang to the hospital. I see myself now, ten years old, too short for my age, jumping on her bed, worried sick, not knowing exactly what was wrong. I found that out for myself later on, when they took me to see her in the San Pablo City Hospital, then later at the San Juan de Dios along Dewey Boulevard. I knew she had cancer by the time they took her back home; they cleared our living room and put in a hospital bed. I watched relatives, friends, and strangers stream in and out of our house. Some of them slept on Lola Guelang’s bed. I didn’t care; I had grown tired of swimming on it.
One morning, I woke up to the sound of muffled sobs from the living room. Lola Guelang was saying goodbye. My mother took my hand and led me to her bedside. I stood beside Ate Minda, my cousin whom Lola Guelang had sent through medical school. When Lola Guelang saw me, she made Ate Minda promise to take me with her to the States so she could send me through school. Ate Minda did, and my mother cried. I don’t know if it was because she was grateful to Ate Minda, or because she was sad that her mother would go at any moment, or because she was afraid she would lose her only son.
Lola Guelang didn’t leave us that day. She lived for a few months more. Long, very long, months. I went to school every day, afraid that she’d be gone when I came home. Sometimes I’d catch her laughing with her visitors and I would begin to believe that she could be well again. But one afternoon, she finally left us. I watched as her children, my sister, and our cousins surrounded her bed. I couldn’t join them. Nobody held my hand to lead me to her. I was scared to come on my own. I didn’t say goodbye.
Twenty years later, I wrote this poem on my own bed, in my own room, in a much bigger city, away from home:
GRANDMA ISN’T HOME
Grandma wasn’t home
So I dove and I swam
All over her huge bed.
They had taken her out
Very early that day In a big white van.
But she was very soon back
So I sulked as I sat
At the foot of her bed.
She lay and she smiled
As I sulked and I sat
And wished for my waves.
Then one sunny day
They came in a black van
And took her away.
I smiled through my tears
As I dove and I swam
All over her big bed.
TIYO LAURO, 1966
When I was five, Tiyo Lauro came home with a gift for my sister. A doll’s eye. It scared me terribly, but everyone else laughed, including my sister who for months had begged him for a walking doll. It took me some years to understand that it was a joke.
You see, Tiyo Lauro, my mother’s younger half‑brother, a bachelor who lived with us on week‑ends, worked at the Bureau of Customs in Manila. My family knew another man who worked in the same place and this man was rich. He brought home imported chocolates, battery‑operated toys, sweaters and shoes and bicycles, everything a child could ever wish for; we knew all this because he was the father of the wife of one of my first cousins. Tiyo Lauro brought nothing home but his dirty clothes for our maids to wash. Well, sometimes he would give me White Rabbit or Haw Flakes, or even a couple of apples in December, but nothing more than that. And yes, that doll’s eye for my sister that everyone else found funny. My mother asked him once why the other customs man had so much while he had nothing but he said nothing. He was like that. He usually said nothing. And when he said something, it was to tell me not to do this or that without even telling me why. I didn’t really like him.
I didn’t really know much about him. When I was seven, I discovered some of his secrets. He left his closet unlocked one Sunday‑‑he woke up late and rushed off to Mass‑‑and I found some girlie magazines inside it, along with some bullets and a periscope and a huge camera with a big flash. He loved taking pictures of all sorts of things. Once I saw his pictures of the World Boy Scout Jamboree in Los Banos and of a bullfight held somewhere in Manila. He also had pictures of our relatives who lived in Mindanao; he visited them often and came home with all sorts of strange things‑‑a deer’s skull, horns and all; a monkey’s breast, cut‑up and salted; a plaque full of miniature swords.
I can’t forget what Tiyo Lauro did one election period. I was eleven and precocious, as my father always put it, and while everyone else in the family campaigned for Macapagal, Tiyo Lauro insisted Marcos would win. The more I begged him to vote Macapagal, the more he praised Marcos. He said Macapagal had done nothing for the country and Marcos was smart and young and was the hope of the land. We ended up with me shouting at him and him laughing at me. I decided then that I hated Tiyo Lauro. On election morning, however, he called me into his room and showed me his sample ballot. It had Macapagal’s name on it.
Marcos won anyway but Tiyo Lauro and I never fought again. I don’t even remember being mad at him after that, although I don’t really recall having a good time with him either. I just know that I stopped hating him.
One midnight, two years after Lola Guelang’s death, I woke up and found my mother crying beside my father who was talking to someone on the phone. Tiyo Lauro had been shot. Dead. It was a hold‑up in a jeepney, my father was told. But when Tiyo Lauro’s flag‑draped coffin came to our house for the wake, we discovered the real story.
Tiyo Lauro had been a customs secret agent all along. That was why he never brought anything home. He was about to bust a smuggling syndicate when they did him in. The night he was murdered, he took a jeepney home, as he had done every single night. He sat beside the driver, and a man came up behind him and shot him through his left shoulder. The bullet, just one bullet, went straight to his heart.
We found out something else, or at least we still think of it as something, the following afternoon, when some people who introduced themselves as his office‑mates came to the wake. One of them, a woman in a grey dress, spent a long time looking at Tiyo Lauro. We, my cousins and I, spent as much time watching her. When she lifted her dark glasses and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, we knew we were on to something. No one, of course, dared to ask her who she was. Not even my mother. She was too busy grieving.
I had not seen my mother cry as much as she did then. Not even during Lola Guelang’s funeral. I found out why when we laid Tiyo Lauro to rest. When we got to the family plot, my mother sobbed over Lola Guelang’s grave. She asked for her mother’s forgiveness; she should have watched over her younger brother more, she cried over and over and over again. Even as a soldier gave Tiyo Lauro a gun salute; even when a bugler played taps. After a few weeks, I saw a picture of my mother, puffy‑eyed, standing with their siblings in front of Gate One of Port Area, under a huge sign that read, "Agent Lauro de la Cruz Gate".
Many years later, and thousands of miles away from home, I paid my own homage‑of‑sorts to Tiyo Lauro, in a poem about, of all things, my father’s gun. I’m sure Tiyo Lauro, silent and absent as he often was, will see some humor in appearing unnamed in an‑almost‑parenthetical remark in a rather long poem written by a nephew he knew very little about and who knew very little about him.
HALINA THE LURE
Kinagisnan ko na I grew up
Ang baril ni Itay. Knowing my father’s gun.
Nakatago ito He kept it
Sa makapal na supot In a thick cotton bag
Kasama ang mga kahon With boxes
Ng maliliit na punglo Of small bullets
Sa kanyang aparador. In his closet.
Kung minsan Sometimes,
Kapag may nabalitaan Hearing of a robbery
Siyang nakawan kung saan Somewhere in the city,
Itinatabi ni Itay My father slept
Sa pagtulog ang baril; With his gun;
Ilang araw iniiwan For days he’d leave it
Sa ilalim ng unang Beneath the pillow
Madalas kong dantayan That I loved to hug
Kapag naglalambing ako Everytime I snuggled up
Sa kanila ni Inay. To him and my mother.
Madalas kong panoorin I often watched him
Ang paglilinis ng baril‑‑ Clean his gun‑‑
Isa‑isang tinatanggal He’d remove the bullets
Ang mga lamang punglo One by one
Saka pinupunasan Then wipe it clean
Ng nilangisang tela; With an oily cloth;
Pagkatapos sandaling Then for a few moments,
Ipadadama sa akin He’d let me feel
Ang kinis, lamig The smoothness and hardness
At tigas nitong baril. Of this cold gun.
Tuwing magpapalit ang taon On the last night of each year,
Itinututok ito My father aimed the gun
Ni Itay sa langit At the sky
At mabilis na pinapuputok And quickly fired it
Nang anim na uli; Six times;
Isang Bagong Taon One New Year’s eve
Pinahawakan ni Itay He let me hold the gun,
Sa akin ang baril, He made me aim at the sky
Pinaasinta ang langit And told me to pull the trigger;
At pinakalabit ang gatilyo; Just once, he said,
Minsan lang, sabi niya, But I did it
Ngunit inulit‑ulit ko. Again and again.
Nang magbinata ako When I became older
Inalok ako ni Itay My father offered me
Ng sarili kong baril; My own gun;
Mabuti raw na pananggalang It would be a good shield
O kaya’y babala Or a fair warning, he said,
Sa may masamang tangka. To anyone who meant bad.
Hindi ko tinanggap I refused it
Dahil hindi ko malimutan For I could not forget
Ang umagang dumating The morning when I saw
Sa aming tahanan In our own home
Ang mga damit na duguan The blood drenched clothes
Ng kapatid ni Inay Of my mother’s brother
Na kinitil ng punglong Killed by a bullet
Tumagos sa kanyang puso; That penetrated his heart;
Samantalang humihikbi As my mother sobbed
Binuklat ni Inay She unfolded the shirt
Ang kamisadentrong With a hole on one sleeve.
Sa manggas lang ang butas. It was a clever assailant,
Mahusay ang salarin, I said to myself;
Sa loob‑loob ko, He knew by heart
Kabisadong‑kabisado niya A bullet’s chosen path.
Ang hilig ng punglo. But up to this day,
Subalit hanggang ngayon Everytime I open the closet
Tuwing bubuksan ang aparador Or lie on my parents’ bed
O hihiga ako sa kama nina Itay I am tempted to pick up
Natutukso akong damputin My father’s gun,
Ang kanyang baril, Feel the cold,
Damhin ang lamig, kinis And the smoothness and the hardness,
At tigas nito, Fit my finger around its trigger
Isukat ang hintuturo And once more
Ko sa gatilyo Pull it very hard.
At muli itong kalabitin
Nang mariing‑mariin.
DORIS, 1988
"Doris of Paris". That was what one Jesuit called her, not just because she lived and studied in Paris for several years and spoke what native French speakers said was impeccable French, but also because she seemed to have brought Paris home with her. At least that’s what our friends who had lived in Paris, too, used to say. I had only been to Paris once, for a few days, so I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what they meant.
I was sure, however, that Doris was no Parisian when I first noticed her. I remember the moment well. My girlfriend and I were in the Ateneo faculty lounge sometime in 1980 when she made me aware that there was a Doris Capistrano teaching Math in the college. "There," she whispered, referring to a thin, young woman with long, black hair, and a very long, frilly dress, lining up for lunch in the college cafeteria. "Isn’t Doris attractive?" No, I whispered back to her, and meant it. She looked much too conservative to be attractive, I added.
Things changed, however, after Doris had received her masteral degree in math in Paris and I had broken up with my girlfriend. Doris came back to teach in Ateneo and we ended up in the same circle of friends. She was definitely attractive and not just because she wore her hair and her skirts short‑‑her eyes lit up as she talked about Paris and math and food and poetry. She was enthusiastic about almost everything, and she showed it not only as she talked but also as she walked and jogged and did almost everything else.
I eventually saw her doing almost all sorts of things when she moved into the campus and became a prefect in the dorm next to where I lived. I helped fix up her room and she spent a lot of time in mine. We watched television and listened to tapes; she cooked while I ate and washed the dishes until she decided I should cook, too, so we suffered through some dishes together; I introduced her to my younger friends and she told me about the boyfriend she left in Paris‑‑a young flautist who played around a lot. Yes, I listened to her heartaches. And she listened to mine.
We never cried to each other, though. We almost always laughed together. We went out with friends who loved the same things we did‑‑movies, parties, food, concerts, travel, clothes. Yes, clothes. Dressing up, for Doris, was an art, along with sketching, painting, designing, sewing, making patchwork wall hangings, all of which she also did, and did quite well. Everything had to be right, and to be right, it had to be different. And she made sure people appreciated her art. Once, during a faculty party, she made me guess how many ribbons she had on her. I guessed and missed two; they were embroidered above the heel of her black stockings. Yes, her art was also a game.
For Doris, even work was a game. She enjoyed math immensely and she even managed to make me understand how high math was much like literature‑‑you create imaginary worlds with their own laws and, well, world views. She did her work diligently‑‑she taught and studied math, tutored some high school kids, gave private lessons in French. But every time she had to work she’d say, "Well, I’ll have to go and pretend to work again".
She couldn’t pretend that she was fine, though, when she finally realized that the flautist had found another woman. She kept to herself and wouldn’t tell me how she felt. I worried about her, but there was nothing anyone could do for Doris if she didn’t want them to do anything for her. Doris was stubborn. That part of her I didn’t like. But I waited.
It took some time, but she finally got over that man. It was partly because she met another‑‑a young Belgian consul. At once, she knew, and we, her closest friends, knew, that they were perfect for each other. He even knew how to court her friends. He drove from Makati to jog with us around Ateneo; he took us out of town in his car; he gave parties for us in his house. Most of all, like Doris, he showed interest in what we did, how we felt, who we hated, who we loved.
One Thursday evening, after judging a contest in the dorm, Doris and I shared some beer in my room; the consul had some diplomatic chores. She and I had not talked for some time before that evening, and she began by asking me about my young friends, naming each one as she did. After I told her what they were up to, she asked me how I was. I told her I had a cyst on my back and that I would undergo a minor operation that coming Saturday; I confessed that I was scared‑‑after all, the cyst could be malignant. She laughed that off and said, "So, what will you leave me if you die?"
I asked her how she was, how she and the consul were, and if her parents knew about him. She said she felt he loved her and she loved him too, and that they had talked about a future together, but nothing was definite, so she had told her parents nothing about the relationship. Her mother had seen her through her last heartbreak, and Doris didn’t want her to be anxious again. Not that early, anyway.
That weekend, while I nursed a punctured back and worried about the biopsy result, Doris drove with the consul to Taal, to meet some friends and motor to the volcano. I came back to Ateneo on Monday and found a note on my door. The head prefect wanted to talk to me about something. But before I could see him, a friend called. She told me Doris had been murdered.
She tried to explain how it had happened but I couldn’t even listen. I rushed to the bathroom, I don’t know why, but I did, and I remembered how I used to wash the dishes in the sink after dining with Doris, how she wouldn’t allow her boyfriend to shower in her bathroom after jogging so he had to use mine, how she made fun of my "nervous bladder". And I cried.
I rushed to the morgue and found Doris on a stretcher, her face bloated for having been under the sun for hours after she died. Our other friends were there, too, discussing what Doris would have wanted to wear for the very last time. We knew, as we grieved, how important that was to Doris. It would have to be the brown suit her boyfriend had given her. But it couldn’t be. Her mother wanted her to wear an embroidered gown, something we all knew Doris wouldn’t be caught dead in. But we also knew that Doris would have laughed that one off; after all, a funeral could just very well be another game for her‑‑she could say she was just pretending to be dead. Just as she could say that she was, all along, just pretending to live. It was as if she knew how her life would be so short; everything just had to be a game, everything just had to mean joy.
We never found out why Doris was murdered. She had been shot from behind, just one bullet piercing her chest. Later, I saw a picture taken a few hours after she had died, why it was taken I never really knew for sure. She lay on a cart; she wore a light blue chambray shirt, deep blue denim pants, light blue sneakers, and shocking pink socks‑‑so very Doris. Her face showed no sign of pain. Thank God, I thought, she must have heard that shot and thought that someone was just bird‑hunting. She might have even wished she could join their game.
That did not console me, however. I remember crying many, many times for Doris‑‑during the wake in the college chapel; during her funeral; during the afternoons I was alone in my room, imagining Doris calling out my name from outside. No friend had died on me before, I told everyone, and I never imagined it could bring such pain. I cried as I read the many poems written about her, for her, by the people she loved, by the people who loved her. I couldn’t write one myself, even if, after only a few weeks, I found myself returning to the usual run of things‑‑waking up, eating, teaching, having fun, playing all sorts of games, and doing all sorts of things as if Doris had not died.
After a year, when I found myself very much alone, during a very cold spring many miles away from home, not too distant from the city that Doris loved, this came:
NGAYON LAMANG MASASABI I CAN ONLY SAY THIS NOW
Kay Doris For Doris
Nang yumao ka When you died
Nang biglang‑bigla Rather suddenly
Naghinagpis ako I grieved
At lubhang nangulila And longed for you deeply
Ngunit pagkaraan But after
Ng iilang araw Only a few days
Mabilis na nakabalik I quickly returned
Sa nakagawian nang To the usual
Takbo ng buhay. Run of things.
Sandali ko This alarmed me
Itong ikinabahala, For a moment,
Tulad ng saglit Like the brief anxiety
Na pagkabagabag About my thinning hair
Sa pagdalang ng buhok When I look into the mirror
Sa aking tuktok After I wake up each morning.
Pagtingin ko sa salamin
Tuwing ako’y gigising.
AND, YES, THERE WERE OTHERS
Yes, there were others after Doris. They passed away in very quick succession, not even leaving me enough time to grieve in between. I know it may be too early for me to write about their deaths, but I can not stop now. I will not.
I want to write about Kuya Nelson, his mother’s favorite son. The beautiful one, she bragged. He grew up to be a pretty boy, so pretty girls couldn’t resist him. He had girlfriends anytime, and everywhere. At nineteen, he was forced to marry his teacher, after her brothers caught them making love in their classroom. She eventually left him, and he took up with a younger woman, fathered her children, lived in different homes with other women, and ended up with so many children no one even tried to keep track of how many they were and where they stayed. At forty, he lost the woman he lived with to a couple of farm workers who hacked her to death because Kuya Nelson had treated them badly. He, too, suffered deep wounds in his chest and legs, but lived to take in another woman. Once, when she gave birth, one of his other lovers came to care for her and her baby. Later, Kuya Nelson began an affair with a soldier’s wife; he also "exported" female entertainers and dabbled in local politics. Three years ago, Kuya Nelson and his eldest son were riddled with bullets as they approached the gate of their farm.
I want to write about Tiya, my father’s eldest sister. She who quit school to support her brothers and sisters. She who opened a store, traded all sorts of things from all sorts of places, and sent her nephews and nieces to school for she never had her own child; she who watched over my sister when she left San Pablo to study in Manila; she who was too old to travel when it was my turn to live away from home. Tiya’s wards all left her, some she proudly sent off to America and Canada, some she drove away from her house in rage. She ended up alone in her house, waiting for visits and dollars and whatever little love came her way. I sometimes made her smile, with a wave, or a gift, or a kiss; often I just ignored her for she had become bitter and nasty and cruel. But she lived on, until she could hardly hear, until she could hardly walk, until she could hardly care whether or not anyone else cared about her. A few months ago, a stroke took her life. During the wake, relatives and friends filled her house. The ones she loved most, the nephews and nieces she had proudly sent off to America and Canada, couldn’t come. They sent dollars instead, and instructions on what should be done to whatever Tiya had left behind.
I want to write about Berms, my friend, the one who treated me like a brother for he never had a real one. We went to college together, lived in the same dormitory, had the same set of friends, shared each other’s clothes and food and home and secrets and dreams. He wanted to be a politician. Through college, law school, government service and private practice, he made and lost all sorts of friends. But he was faithful, very faithful, to some‑‑we he played mahjong with, we the victims of his practical jokes, we the godparents of his children, we he opened his home and his heart to, we who stayed with him until the very end. We discovered he had cancer a month before he died. He knew immediately how sick he was; there was nothing you could hide from Berms. We saw him hope he would survive his illness and travel with us again. We saw him eventually accept the inevitability of death, trusting his God to keep him and his wife and his children in His care. Later, we saw him question that same God and reject whatever consolation we tried to offer him. And then one evening we saw him make peace with the same God, and make sure that we‑‑his wife, his children, his mother, his cousins, his friends‑‑were one with him in meeting that God and one with each other in living through his passing. But this could not diminish the pain his leaving left us. Left me.
I am still in pain.
I have not recovered the part of me that died with him.
I have not recovered the part of me that died, too, with Lola Guelang, Tiyo Lauro, Mr. Ongpin, Doris, Kuya Nelson and Tiya.
I don’t know if I ever will.
Loyola Heights
22 September 1994