Brook Emery reviews Motherlode and Not A Muse

 

Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry, 1986-2008

 

Jennifer Harrison & Kate Waterhouse (eds)

 

Puncher and Wattmann, 2009

ISBN9781921450167

www.puncherandwattmann.com/pwmotherlode.html

 

 
 

 

Not A Muse

Kate Rogers, Viki Holmes (eds)

Haven Books, Hong Kong 

ISBN 978-988-18094-1-4

http://www.havenbooksonline.com/books/catalogue/not-a-muse 

 

Reviewed by BROOK EMERY

 

 

 

 

               What are my credentials, or lack thereof, to review these two anthologies of women’s poetry?

 

            Despite an androgynous first name, I am a sliced-white-bread, baby-boomer male. Husband not wife. Father not mother. I am also instinctively uneasy with categorisations that assume difference based on gender. Boys Book, Chick Lit – leave me out. Men analytical, women emotional; men aggressive, women nurturing – stop it! Men’s movements re-discovering the bear or hunter in themselves, women learning to be assertive – how sad. Single sex schools – indefensible, an admission of failure. Once, after a reading, I was told by one poet that my ‘sensibility was very feminine’ and, almost immediately afterwards, by another poet that my ‘voice was so masculine’. What to make of this? (That difference is in the ear of the beholder?) What to do? (Shrug and laugh?)

 

           But biology and evolution cannot be denied, and neither can social conditioning, nor entrenched beliefs and prejudices, and historically, politically and culturally it was, and, unfortunately, maybe still is, important that spaces are made for ‘women’s writing’, though something will have to be done about such a term because it implicitly defines itself not just against the non-existent term ‘men’s writing’ but against ‘writing’ .

 

          Perhaps it’s not so strange that I should have felt compelled to question my reviewing credentials as, in their own ways, the editors of each book exhibit a little nervousness about the reception of their projects and feel a need to position their anthologies within the history of feminism and so-called post-feminism. Harrison and Waterhouse write in their joint introduction to Motherlode:

 

We have been asked whether this is a feminist book and it undoubtedly is, if feminism is defined as that which women know and strive to make known.

 

         They acknowledge that much has changed in the lives of women as a result of feminism but identify the enduring experiences as:

 

the realities of fertility, pregnancy, birth and the bonds between mothers and their mothers, daughters and sons.

 

          The editors of Not A Muse: the inner lives of women are more political. Kate Rogers writes that the book explores,

 

how we define ourselves as women. Are we living our lives honestly, completely true to ourselves? If we choose an unconventional life, what are the costs? Not a Muse is, in part, about our choices. How we define ourselves as women and poets. How we define freedom.

 

          Viki Holmes asks rhetorically, ‘To what end an anthology of women only in this post-feminist era? Shouldn’t we be looking beyond divisions of gender in the 21st century?’ She doesn’t really answer these questions specifically other than to assert a right, or need, to speak and occupy the foreground:

 

Woman as mysterious, retreating Other; an enigmatic figure retreating in the distance, inspiring and intriguing – and silent. But what happens when the muse speaks? Not a Muse began as an attempt to redress this relegating of women to be sources of inspiration rather than creators. The voices in this anthology speak eloquently, reflectively, and with certainty, about the roles women have chosen for themselves – perhaps enigmatic, certainly inspiring and intriguing – but never in the distant background.

 

          In a preface, ‘On Reading Woman’, the Indonesian poet Laksmi Pamuntjak tackles possible objections to the anthology even more directly. She asks:

 

Aren’t the days of being jumpy at the very mention of the word ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ finally over, because women have advanced by leaps and bounds to assert themselves as a subject first and foremost, of which ‘woman’ is only part? … Hasn’t women’s liberation gone to such amazing lengths that many modern-day feminists now even believe that the very concept of woman is a fiction, thus raising the possibility that the concept of women’s oppression is finally obsolete and feminism’s raison d’etre has fallen away?

 

More pertinently: do we still need an anthology of women’s writing? Does it not seem an endorsement of the gender polarisation that women have fought so long and hard to batter down?

 

         Her answers to the last two questions are unequivocal: ‘yes’, then ‘no’. They rest. in part, on an undeniable political truth: ‘ in many parts of the world where women have no voice, no discourse, no place from which to speak, defining the ‘feminine’ is a luxury that cannot be corralled into the collective’.

 

          Really, neither book needs an apology or a theoretical feminist defence. The impregnable defence of both anthologies is just that they are artful, interesting explorations of human experience. Each one demonstrates the power of good poetry to engage people on emotional and conceptual levels not easily accessed by other means. How much more powerful, subtle and informing these poems are than shelves full of theory, therapy or self-help.

 

         Motherlode is a great title playing as it does on all the resonances of exploration, mining and discovery, of richness, abundance and centrality, while gently ghosting the homophone ‘load’ with its connotations of weight and burden. With 125 poets, 172 poems, and at over 300 pages it is abundant indeed. Published by the innovative and relatively new Sydney publishing house Puncher and Wattmann, it is also a beautifully produced book, attractive to look at and to hold. The cover is flexi-case which is closer to traditional hardcover than soft cover, there is a headband at the top and bottom of the spine, and even an attached bookmark ribbon. The binding is stitched, the paper gorgeous, and it is sharply printed and laid out: the packaging does justice to the content.

 

            The focus of Motherlode is clearly defined and circumscribed. It is dedicated to ‘our mothers’ and is not designed to include all shades of female experience but to explore the experience of motherhood and to make this accessible to the general reader. The anthology is divided into twelve sections: nature, icons, pregnancy, birth, infancy, sons and daughters, daily grind, loss, old wives tales, mothers and grandmothers, the world, this last retreat. 

 

            The editors suggest that the anthology be considered as a collective narrative and they invite us to read it sequentially as one would a novel. This can work, as poem after poem seems to be a conversation with and a departure from the one preceding it. To read it thus is, perhaps, to impose a narrative consistency and might lead to the temptation to construct archetypes corresponding to the section headings. Thus, to take for example the section heading ‘Birth’, the reader might move from ‘I am waiting / for what emerges / from the white edges / of catastrophe’ (Alison Croggon), to ‘Prostaglandin spreads like cold honey / my cervix ripening, as an avocado in brown paper’ (Kathryn Lomer) to ‘The next pain / takes your spine apart. / Pelvis gags / some kind of thing with horns / in its throat’ (Rebecca Edwards), to ‘Out from you as if in a continuum / is she still yourself? Finally she is not / She separates calmly, not crying’ (Phyllis Perlstone), to ‘This is the first thing I want you to know. I am your mother and you arrived in me and from me. You arrived not “child as other” but as the child of my centre, the child of grass and orchards, of mulberries in summer’ (Jennifer Harrison) to ‘Early this morning, when workmen were switching on lights / in chilly kitchens, packing their lunch boxes / into their Gladstone bags, starting their utes in the cold / and driving down quiet streets under misty lamps, / my daughter bore a son’ (Margaret Scott), to ‘At Bindawalla, the hospital / where only Aboriginal babies were born, / the nurses laughed as they put me in a shoe-box / and gave me to my mother; she cried’ (Elizabeth Hodgson), and finally to Rosemary Dobson: ‘Eight times it flowered in the dark, / Eight times my hand reached out to break / That icy wreath to bear away / Its pointed flowers beneath my heart. / Sharp are the pains and long the way / Down, down into the depths of night / Where one goes for another’s sake’. 

 

           There is nothing wrong with this way of reading unless the reader imposes unwarranted  generalisations rather than paying attention to the particularities of individual poems; to the way in which the same subject and similar experiences provoke such different responses and voices. Perhaps, though, just as profitably one can dip in and out of this collection reading each poem as poem and not worrying about its place in any sequence, jumping from, say, Jan Owen’s ‘We have no tender name / for you, small being, / drawn awry by some sad chance / as though you thought to play / too early with earth’s creatures, / fish, fowl, seal’ to J S Harry’s ‘I am mrs mothers’ day / I will hire myself out to you / for the 364 other days / I will not be satisfied by / 1 plus 364 / grottybunches of whitechrysanthemum / you choose to offer me snottynose’. Either way the reader will find lively poems which refuse to be shaped to fit any theory – one of the strengths of this anthology is that the editors, while elegantly shaping the collection, have not sought to impose boundaries.  

 

          Motherlode’s timeframe is restricted. The book concentrates on poems published between 1986 and 2008 and aims to be as representative as possible of the range of poets writing in that period. 1986 is chosen as the starting date because that was when the groundbreaking  Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets was published and, although comparison is not intended, inevitably and valuably, Motherlode will allow readers to consider what changes and continuities they can detect over this period. Motherlode publishes a number of poets (Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Faye Zwicky, Judith Rodriguez, Margaret Scott, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Bobbi Sykes and Rosemary Dobson among them), and a few poems, which appeared in the earlier anthology but it also gives space to newer and younger poets including Rebecca Edwards, Morgan Yasbincek, L K Holt, Petra White, Elizabeth Campbell, Jane Gibian, Esther Ottaway, Lisa Gorton, Judith Bishop and Francesca Haig. The editors say that, to make their selection, they read over 500 books of poetry (plus print and on-line journals).  One of the excitements of this generous and generous-spirited anthology is to discover the number of Australian women poets writing now and the strength of their writing – from my own reading I’d hazard a guess that among the emerging generation of poets it is the women who are the most numerous and impressive. Opening the anthology with Gwen Harwood’s ‘Mother Who Gave Me Life’ and closing it with Judith Wright’s ‘Woman to Child’ provide powerful vantage points from which to view the achievement and consider the evolution of the tradition.  

 

            If Motherlode is a big book, Not A Muse, at over 500 pages, is huge. It features 114 poets from 24 countries. Ten of the poets (Pam Brown, Michelle Cahill, Suzanne Gervay, Margaret Grace, Tanya Hart, Jayne Fenton Keane, Laura Jean McKay, Kate Middleton, Leanne Murphy, Katrin Talbot) are Australian and, of these, only two, Pam Brown and Michelle Cahill, appear in Motherlode, and six were previously unknown to me. Perhaps the lack of crossover can be explained by the selection process – as I understand it the poets in Not A Muse were chosen by submission rather than by reading the available literature though, perhaps, some of the more well-known poets (Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, Erica Jong, Lorna Crozier, Laksmi Pamuntjak,) may have been invited to submit. This selection by submission does mean the quality of the poetry is a uneven and representation might be a little unbalanced but I don’t want that to sound like a serious criticism as I found much within these pages to enjoy and much that was new to me. The many countries represented allow for speculation about what might be thought universal and what culturally or personally specific.

 

          Not A Muse is dedicated to ‘our mothers and sisters’. Its intent can be guessed by the politically and emotionally charged ‘sisters’ and it’s conceptual scope gauged by the sections into which it is divided. Each is conceived as an aspect of female identity, so each heading, bar the last, is preceded by the words ‘Woman as’: creator, family, archetype, explorer, myth maker, home maker, landscape, lover, freedom fighter, keeper of secrets, keeper of memories, ageing. It is tempting to read Not A Muse, more so than Motherlode, as a single, multi-voiced argument, as chapters in a developing thesis. The title is a rejection or a negative definition, specifically of Robert Graves’s conception of woman as poetic muse. The collection overtly celebrates woman as subject and agent, active, outspoken, central to the creation of her own life and the life of others. Here the section headings really do read like archetypes and could be said to be imposing limits on the conception ‘woman’. Can you imagine a collection with headings like: homemaker, housekeeper, spouse, companion or, indeed, muse?

 

            This last question is not intended seriously. Poems on my imagined subjects do appear in the anthology and, indeed, ‘home maker’ is one of the headings. Individual poems in this anthology escape the confines of any characterisation even when they are at their most political and assertive and as I was reading I kept mentally thinking this poem could equally appear under this heading or that one. Try fitting the following excerpts under their assigned headings (answers appear, in order, at the end of the review):

 

Inside me, an Eastern European poet

is trying to get out. He’s killing me,

and I, with my recurring ear infections

and job, am slowly stifling him.

(Joan Hewitt)

 

I’m not getting up

when you call

I don’t want to

do your bidding

 

I’ll just lie here

chase some flies

with my eyes

 

You can be

forgiving

(Kavita Jindal)

 

Like a river feeding itself to the ocean,

Child, I continue to give myself to you

Until I become undone – scattered pockets

Of primitive earth, peeled bare.

(Tammy Ho Lai-Ming)

 

Because, like a poem, the city doesn’t know where our feet will

take us, we walked, unseeing, inaudible, heart-shaped. Too

many signs to follow. But there was a delight in being lost,

and rivering along took care of that until our voices

grew shrill and words

hung

        in the air

(Laksmi Pamuntjak)

 

imagine your mother

down on her knees

and sucking cock

and understand you will never really know her

(Nicole Homer)

 

I have not swept the floor – the Amy of Now

must pass that task to the Amy of Tomorrow

along with folding the clothes

and taking the garbage out. Tomorrow’s Amy

may not mind, she might open the day

eager to eat chores with a fork

(Amy Maclennan)

 

The black of Radha’s hair is cow dung

and soot

Her arms of yellow

tumeric, pollen or perhaps

lime and the milk

of banyan leaves

   (Nitoo Das)

 

One day she will put her hands out, fingers long

like yours

and she will

hold you

play you

 

and she will find the words that will turn you

into a cunt

(Sridala Swami)

 

A funnel has been shoved into my mouth

through which I am force-fed the sky.

I have eaten thunderheads, slaughtered angels.

And now they are mashing up the stars

into baby gruel.

‘You can eat anything,’ the doctors say

(Pascale Petit)

 

a Kurdish woman sang me a lullaby,

she said bab meant gate,

she said I know no poems

but I can sing to my dead child,

will you listen? And I think,

the whole world is listening,

you just don’t know it.

(Kirsten Rian)

 

I open my hand, see wrinkles, cold marks

of God’s anger upon my flesh. In these veins

runs depleted blood, returning capillary

by capillary from the centre of this rot.

Once, when I was a girl, I stood at the edge

of the sea and was tumbled over

by a rogue wave. What would it have been like

to glide on the undertow past kelp gardens

and coral reefs …

(Carol Dorf)

 

Who wants to hear about

two old farts getting it on

in the back seat of a buick,

in the garden shed among vermiculite,

in the kitchen where we should be drinking

ovaltine and saying no?

(Lorna Crozier)

 

 

     

           The differences between women (writers) are as great as the similarities. The similarities between men and women (writers) are as great as the differences. The particular disproves any generalisation but generalisations persist. The strength of both these books, on social, political and artistic levels, is that they give voice to similarities and differences, to the particularity and generality of female experiences. These are poems by women from women’s perspectives about women’s experiences but they are not just for women. It would be a terrible failure of  sensibility if a male reader were unable to imaginatively and enjoyably live within the poems in these two valuable collections. Both books belong in all public and educational libraries and would certainly augment a private collection.

 

(Answers: Creator, Family, Archetype, Explorer, Myth Maker, Home Maker, Landscape, Lover, Freedom Fighter, Keeper of Secrets, Keeper of Memories, Ageing.)

 

Form and Fashion in Stephen Edgar’s Verse: Michelle Cahill reviews History Of The Day

History Of The Day                                                    

by Stephen Edgar

Black Pepper Press, 2009

ISBN 9781876044626

http://users.vic.chariot.net.au/~bpepper/edgarhotd.html

 

Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL

 

             History of the Day is Stephen Edgar’s seventh collection. Acclaimed for his formal virtuosity, the painterly style of his images, and an objective, pondering engagement with his themes, his work stems from the modernist tradition for which temporal, aesthetic and moral categories are ordered into a wholeness: that which Stevens refers to as a “blessed rage for order,” and Adam Kirsch describes as “its unequivocally positive character.” But how relevant is Edgar’s quiet insistence on aesthetic and ethical authenticity in the discursive climate of postmodernity? His formal music might seem to be mannered, anachronistic, or elitist even, in its positioned detachment from the real. Reading History of the Day, might seem a foreign experience, rather like learning a new language, Edgar’s work being labyrinthine and at times recondite. His polished cognizance, his formally oblique and elaborate praise of things ordinary defies a trend in contemporary poetics. Seemingly removed from the lineage of Rimbaud, Lowell, Plath or indeed Adamson, his poetry is, if challenging, deeply satisfying for its clarity, its faithfulness to measured forms of language and thought.

            History of The Day is a collection of modesty and harmony. An outward sign of its grace is reflected in the book’s structure. Each of three sections are inspired by the epigraph taken from Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar so that we move from poems which encounter the intimately personal, to the those of historical irony and philosophical inflection, followed by the last sequence, a miscellany, in which poems are addressed to other poets. Edgar’s acknowledged influences include WH Auden, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, as well as the Australian poets Gwen Harwood and Peter Porter, among others. His sensibilities are refined, at times overwrought; his preoccupations are with the relativity of time, space, destiny and history. A poem such as “Space” is a fine illustration of Edgar’s themes and style. Here, he takes a single image of a Treasury flag flapping in the breeze as an instance of the physicality of space as it exists in the mind’s eye. The images are visceral. They emphasise a perspective in which the flag is central: the way it “writhes” against the “muscled” breeze, the “distortions” of matter within “a moment’s frame”. The tangential observer, aware of time elapsing, journeys on towards the “day’s blue, contested edges.” Broken into stanzas the poem derives its form from the Italian or Petrachan sonnet, with some license exercised to the rhyme scheme in the octave. The beguiling simplicity of its subject, the elasticity of its iambic metre, and its refined contemplation are hallmarks of Edgar’s most impressive lyrics. It’s a poem that reconciles image, form and thought effortlessly, turning adroitly from minimalism to perceptual complexity.

           Space-time distortions are a principal concern for the poet. In many of the poems Edgar takes a phenomenological interest in experience and how it is structured consciously. His attention to the detail of these processes enables him to amplify scenes, embellish their dimensions and surfaces, so that time is almost warped, slowed down to the shimmering speed of thought. We hear this echoed in the marvellously speculative poem “Dreaming At The Speed Of Light”:

And every thought would undergo
This rallentando, every word
Would grind down to a halt
Midsyllable, interminably heard,
But charged with full intention even so,
And purity of tone,

                                                               (107)

            Quantum ironies resound within the poem’s weave of internal assonance and simple rhymes. Such poems exemplify the liberating and quirky possibilities of Edgar’s formal music.

            The situations and figures are often more emblematic than realistic, creating the mildly disturbing effect of defamiliarisation, so that we are excluded from the engendering of illusion. The subject matter, however benign, is nuanced with a disenchantment that falls short of defeat. This kind of alienation is modernist in its impulse. There is an almost Brechtian distancing effect which along with the historical referencing of many of the poems, imbues them with complex ironies.

            In “ Out of the Picture” Edgar dramatises the dual perspective of an Impressionist painting. On the one hand is the “unnoticed, unmissed” feminine figure who “saunters between/The poplars” out of the picture towards a forgotten ending. The last stanza suggests an alternate perspective of the painting’s observer, for whom it is

As pointless to depart as to delay:
In either course is folded the same space.
In Istanbul next year or here today:

                                                                (23)

            The attention given to the placement of figures, and to the spectator perspective with its minimalist interaction emphasises divisions between the viewer’s world and the picture space or the scene depicted, whether it be through a photograph of lynching as in the powerful evocation“ Those Hours Which Grew To Be Years”, through a dream, as in “Dream Works” or through a camera lens, as in “The Swallows Of Baghdad.” As a war poem, one could argue that “The Swallows Of Baghdad” pursues its ethical argument tentatively, leaning towards a tactful, aestheticised vision of war’s brutality. The swallows with their “flickering wings,” who dart through a “ruined roof/To perch on dreadful engines,” are twice removed from the observer, being reminiscent of  “a scene from Attenborough.” Edgar’s instincts are always on the side of aesthetics, though one feels the tension  between this principle and what is being represented. Moreover the poem attempts to eschew complacency in its ending lines:

A camera reeling in that chamber follows
Their lit flight, where—too recently to show—
The cameras turned to darkness for their proof.

                                                                  (53)

             The framing of scenes and narratives is one aspect of the poet’s architectonic finesse but it’s also a lens through which history and memory can be purposeful; intensifying and correcting time. This is beautifully realised in the book’s opening poem “Golden Coast’, in which natures’s ravages are compared to those of love. Edgar’s diction juxtaposes the idyllic with the hideous, as overdeveloped skyscrapers “make their mark, /Their ulceration of the golden coast/ whose beauties they would sell, Under the settling sediment of dark.”

            Metaphysical in its dialectic and reminiscent of Herbert or Donne, the poem illuminates how memory operates within a dimension that transcends time. The idyllic moment of love’s intensity is preserved :

This day unknown to time will be there when
The light drifts through the shallows like a ghost
And dies of hours, the skies
And earth fall down and chaos comes again.    

                (6)

             How many contemporary poets would dare voice such painterly abstractions, such affirmation? A reader who might resist a title such as “Golden Coast,” is convinced by the thoughtful accuracy of Edgar’s diction, which describes how “lights as laggardly as sound/ Struggle to make the passage of the gloom.”

             Like a Hopper painting, many of the poems play with a symbolic use of light and shade, and the careful placement of figures within a given scene. This attention to topographies and symmetry is distinctly metaphysical, an ordering principle pleasingly realised in “The Earrings”. The central conceit of a deceased lover’s earrings, gifted to a living spouse, play on the spherical as a symbol of nuptial unity, destiny, and the amatory universe. With adroitness the poet is able to reconcile loss with recovery, the ironic with the ardent, to unify

All of the properties,
           The pain,
Pleasures, desires, memories
That nothing will appease,
            Nothing detain,

                                                            (8)

             Chronological time does not correspond to memory, dream or to lived experience as the portals between past and present are traversed in language. Mystical encounters are celebrated: the dead speak, a doppelgänger contradicts himself, entering not a boardroom, but a museum “of lost antiquities”, the “mortared ghost of locomotion surges” in the sculptural form of a train. In the poem “Nocturnal,” Edgar’s prosody echoes a Keatsian ode in its iambic rhetoric:

Who ever thought they would not hear the dead?
Who ever thought that they could quarantine
           Those who are not, who once had been?

                                                            (17)

            The reader is moved and surprised by the poet’s wit. The discrepancy between the recorded and real voice of the poet’s deceased partner is metonymic of the breach between memory and presence, an impasse into which the poem enters.

            History of The Day is a book of Escheresque passages rendered by the effects of recollection, repetition and doubling: The past is “Undeleted,” Edgar writes, “What happened is embedded and repeated.” Speculative, ekphrastic or historical, the poems duplicate and tease semantic possibilities which we encounter in poems like “Parallel Worlds” or “Interior With Interiors”. This latter poem, inspired by a Ramon Casas painting depicts a scene where a woman and man are mutually abandoned to each other: she “self-absorbed”; he perhaps dreaming of bliss, a ‘total consummation” from which he might soon enough be dissatisfied, “wishing to be elsewhere.” The  artefacts of realism: coffee pot, milk jug and vase become little more than props, or “servants liveried to be ignored,” as the text, painting or poem opens to the world of boundless interiors.

            With idiosyncratic flair, Edgar probes the inner milieu. Yet a stronger dialectic between the individual and history than we have come to expect from him is voiced in this collection. The extrajudicial mob violence of white American supremacy is powerfully depicted in “Those Hours Which Grew To Be Years”. Here Edgar critiques the historical lens in his appalled response to photographs of Frank Embree’s and Rubin Stacey’s lynchings. The naked Embree is “stripped/And scored with the judicial script/Of whips,” but the poem returns a Christ-like dignity to his “composed face.”

             Here, at his most outraged, Edgar turns poetic style to indictment. He scrambles the metres. Rarely do we see him mix the insistent accents of dactyl with the iambic and anapaest in his prosody:

      Take him away
      Airbrush him out,
And all these men who stand about
In the clean light of day,

                                                              (48)

            In another poem from the sequence, a young white girl’s voyeurism is depicted with uncharacteristic and intended vulgarity:

Her hands crossed, mimicking his handcuffed hands,
On her frocked crotch, her naked face intense
And lit up with a half-embarrassed leer,           

                                                             (51) 

            These are poems in which the observer’s perspective, regardless of his nationality, class or race exceeds that of witness. Edgar brings into focus the crisis between the social juggernauts of supremacy and a humanist conscience.

            Whatever subject his poems address, no matter how grand or horrific, Stephen Edgar elegantly affirms an objective displacement, sometimes theatrical or emblematic, as moments of recollection, history, art and culture are revisited and referenced. This self-imposed distance renders him faithful to his aesthetic and ethical ideals. Repeatedly, in History Of The Day, what is beautiful is sustained by loss, to become the property of memory. The ravages of history are, at least partially, restored to dignity. Here is a work which dares, in a postmodern, Microsoft era, to entertain serious aesthetic contemplations. The speaker encounters notions of reality that are fragile, provisional and constructed within the infinite domains of space-time as he attempts to order

Dimensions at the heart of matter,
Immensities wound up, that mind

Cannot conceive?

                                                            (72)

 

 

Notes

Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element, WW Norton, New York, 2008, p 10

 

Stephen Atkinson reviews Borobudur by Jennifer Mackenzie

Borobudur

by Jennifer Mackenzie

Transit Lounge

ISBN 978-0-9804616-6-4

Reviewed by STEPHEN ATKINSON     

 

Journeys, actual and metaphorical, geographical and spiritual, and the cultural exchanges they facilitate, are at the heart of Australian poet Jennifer Mackenzie’s epic Borobudur, in which the pilgrimages of Borobudur’s priest-architect Gunavarman are a reflection of the writer’s own travels through the region and the writing process. For Mackenzie, wandering and poetry are in many regards the one thing, both conducted along similar trajectories and according to the same states of mind. Of the creative process of writing Borobudur she has said that, ‘texts, my own travels and experiences pointed in a certain direction and I followed’. Along the way she came upon the poets of the Javanese epics, and Kukai, the peripatetic Japanese monk in whose poetry, to her delight, Mackenzie found echoes of the voice she had worked hard to establish for Gunavarman.

 

            Soon, we are in lockstep with the poet and her guides, feeling the path beneath the soles of their ‘iris-dyed sandals’, embarking on voyages and alighting in sometimes unplanned destinations, hoisted on palanquins, and treated to the hospitality of princes, sages and scribes. The mandala-like structure of the 8th century Buddhist sanctuary of Borobudur was itself designed to be walked, successive clock-wise circumambulations allowing novices to ascend to progressively higher levels on the path to enlightenment, and so the figure of the journey acquires another layer of meaning, welding the experience of space to the rhythm of steady footfall, and to meditation, movement and poetry.

 

            Thomas Stamford Raffles, who governed Java for the British over a brief period from 1811 to 1815, is said to have been sitting in his stately residence in Semarang on the Java Sea when he first heard stories of an immense ancient wonder that lay part buried near the plain of Kedu in Central Java. Borobudur, though the subject of lontar texts and folk tales, and clearly known to people living in the immediate vicinity, was nevertheless shrouded in a mystery maintained by a curse: for members of the Javanese nobility, to visit the site meant certain death. It is said that a young prince, who determined to see for himself the ‘warriors in cages’, vomited blood and died shortly after his return.

 

            Raffles was a product of the English enlightenment, a linguist and scholar fascinated by the cultures, history and antiquities of the places he was assigned to govern. After hearing these fantastical descriptions, he summonsed the Dutch superintendent of historical monuments, Hermann Cornelius, who gathered a team to begin the task of locating Borobudur and disentangling it from centuries of obscurity. After months of steady labour, the extent of the structure and the technical and artistic virtuosity of its creators were revealed. This was almost fifty years before Angkor Wat was hacked from the jungle by a team led by Henri Mouhot, and so constituted Europeans’ first glimpse of the elaborate splendour of the Southeast Asian civilisations that predated their own. Such discoveries could have unsettled some of the presuppositions of superiority that increasingly came to underpin the whole colonial project, but the relatively new field of archaeology, and other disciplines like ethnology that busied themselves with the collection of artefacts, data and knowledge, at the same time constituted another form of conquest.

 

            Mackenzie’s project in some ways runs counter to the task of archaeology because it is more concerned with the limits of knowledge, the restitution of mystery and a return of some of the dust so assiduously swept away. If archaeology undoes the work of time, Borobudur reaffirms it. Central to all investigations into the past, though often unacknowledged, is the matter of mortality. And if Borobudur has something to teach us, it could be that we are all, like everything else, subject to the same processes of transformation, and that the change inherent in movement and time has somehow to be embraced. While staying with a family of dancers in the Indian Buddhist centre of Nalanda, Gunavarman learns ‘that stone and dance could be equivalent’, and

 

that in the weathering of stone

I anticipated my own weathering

in the elegance of the gesture

I could traverse that weathering like a god (65)

 

            While Raffles’ caretaker administration was short-lived, the West’s fascination with Borobudur and structures like it continued, scented with a romance and taste for the exotic not satisfied perhaps by the more austere relics of Europe. The nature of this continuing fascination, Mackenzie’s included, is interesting to ponder. In part it seems to be a case of sunlight and climate, a brightness and clarity that shimmers, sensual and fragrant, and Mackenzie’s verse is full of allusions to colours and light that fill the eyes to aching. Take for example, the sibilant whisper and crystal stillness of:

 

the lake’s transparent water

luxuriant with lotuses

the blue mountain’s snow-capped

summit moves easily

on its surface (p.62)

 

            Here, what is more, is a striking image of a time before time, before the white noise of the present, and core to the affect of Borobudur is its concern with time’s passing, with the difficulty of grappling with either eternity or mortality, and with the poignancy of grand endeavours to achieve posterity that tumble into pointlessness, leaving, at best, an enigma, whose meanings are spent and purposes lost just at the moment of their realisation.

 

            Borobudur gathers together lifetimes lived more slowly and with more conviction, to when journeys embarked upon in the pursuit of wisdom and higher learning could easily stretch to decades. A feature of Borobudur’s strength as a work of poetic cross-cultural interpretation is that it progresses through an engagement with, and imagined dialogue between, the lives, travels and works of the old Javanese poets whose witness offers another glimpse into Borobudur’s historic and cultural significance. In addition to her debt to poets such as Monaguna and Kertayasha, Mackenzie draws inspiration and insights from Prapanca, a documenter of the Majapahit Empire, whose fourteenth-century Negarakertagama makes reference to a Borobudur already long abandoned. That these writers were not all contemporaneous allows Mackenzie to eschew the tyranny of chronology to explore what we mean by timelessness, that is, what we mean when we describe a monument like Borobudur as timeless.

 

            Borobudur can be read as a companion piece to more conventional guidebooks and histories: one that sets out to complicate as the other explicates, to obscure as the other reveals, to propose dimensions less measurable, to replicate Borobudur as it condensed in the mind of its architect, to explore the conditions of its conception, and to remind us that stone is as ephemeral as the people who shift, shape, and attribute meanings to it. Mackenzie renders it all lyrically as clearly as Gunavarman choreographed his epic dance of stone. It presents a Borobudur that visitors today might not immediately recognise as they pay their admission and run the gauntlet of souvenir vendors, but which lingers in the atmosphere, in the evidence of the chisel, in the favourable aspect of the site, and in the spectacular views and blossoming trees that led in part to its selection.

 

            While the poems in the remaining section of this slim, beautifully designed volume, ‘Angkor and other poems’ arrive via different routes, they are similarly the product of Mackenzie’s personal engagement and fascination with the region and they also explore the relationship between wandering and poetry, people and nature, the material and the ethereal, time and disappearance. The haunted final poem of the collection, ‘The Botanist Lost at Lake Maninjau’, suggests the existence of portals to realms outside of time, asynchronous and invisible. For Mackenzie, to be lost in the jungle is to cease to exist or to have entered a world of disappearances. It ends:

 

he entered this light-filled canopy

walked ten minutes

broad leaves coalesced, undergrowth clotted

the air streamed with the inky curlicues of vines

the matte white of a sketch pad appeared iridescent

 

he turned around. the exit had disappeared.

 

 

 

Rob Riel reviews Andrew Slattery’s Canyon

Canyon

by Andrew Slattery

Australian Poetry Centre
ISBN 978-0-9804465-7-9
PO Box 284, Balaclava, VIC, 3183
www.australianpoetrycentre.org.au
 

 

Reviewed by ROB RIEL

 

 

 

 

             Canyon is a handsome chapbook, the cover stylishly sewn rather than stapled to the text. Publication in this form is a valuable initiative of the Australian Poetry Centre, similar in scope to the Five Islands New Poetry Series, and with very much the same objective: to encourage newcomers to the poetic craft. 

            Like Ron Pretty’s earlier enterprise, workshopping of new poets’ manuscripts is a central element of the program.  If publication is the carrot, a week-long intensive residential workshop at Varuna is the stick used to beat a good manuscript into a winning one.  It’s a proven formula going back to 1994; the vetting process works, and the list of successful applicants is distinguished.

 

            Without question, Andrew Slattery merits inclusion in 2009.  On the back cover, Peter Porter describes him as ‘an archaeologist of the Natural World.  He invents a Joycean script.‘  Slattery’s poetry is large, his voice original, his craft sharp.  When he is on song, he’s up there with the best.  That said, his wordplay tends to that excessive exuberance common to talented new writers — which is to say, he can’t pass up a chance to impress.  Hence a few über-Joycean passages in the style of Ulysses and Finnigan’s Wake might be described as overworked. This minor flaw can be willingly dismissed in a manuscript of such promise.

 

            Canyon is a rewarding read, not necessarily an easy one.  The first four poems employ a richly Arctic motif.  William Empson’s Ambiguity Type 1 involves detail, which is effective in several ways simultaneously, and this is one of Slattery’s strengths, as in ‘Arctic Circle, Sweden’:

 

… In the distance a bull elk

lay across one track; the brown slump of weight

rolled into the ground with a span of antlers

 

like petrified angel wings.  When Dad tied them off

with rope at my back, I walked the way home,

but it was like I could fly, with wings of bone

lifting me over the rocks in the midnight sun. 

 

            Two pages later, the title poem Canyon shifts the stage underwater. Here, Slattery limns the vast depths and utter magnitudes of ocean ex ungue, leonem; from the squid, we may fairly observe and admire the whole sea:

 

The giant squid spools along canyons

cut from the ice age — movements

 

aggrandised over time, its organ pipes

roll the sea bed with solitary rills,

hear its weight unlying the sea.  

 

           It’s a strong poem, and none the worse for having appeared elsewhere under the title ‘Bathey Pelagium‘ — identical text, albeit with different (and, to this reviewer’s mind, superior) line breaks.  At least three other fine poems in this 24-page chapbook (‘Lithographone’, ‘Post Office’ and ‘The Rural Piano Rescue Project’) have also been previously published, some as competition prize winners.

 

            Slattery moves on to a more recognisably Australian landscape in the second half of the collection.  ‘Somniform’ has some impressive sequences …

 

Calf and cloud and their cummulant fill

unfurl its new tongue and slup a cloud.

 

The other cows and their dark, bowed heads.

The poppy deflates the balloon in your chest.

Lay on my back, suck slow on the clouds.

The whole world made of stupor.

 

           … though I stumbled somewhat over ‘cummulant’; it’s a statistical term, usually spelled with one ‘m’, and probably chosen for its sound — Slattery is a closet sound poet, which benefits his work when he doesn’t carry it too far.  A few lines later, though, he consults Joyce once too often:

           

This disturbance will uncope the heart.

Poppyblood, white noise, metal sweat, dry brain.

A black oil from boiling the feet of cattle.

My limbs are bound with malevolent sleep.

A pink baby curled up inside each poppy.

 

              This is a higher order of Empsonian ambiguity, the sort of thing emerging poets take great delight in, and which established poets take pride in reining in.  Still, ‘Somniform’ is an impressive piece.  So also ‘Tryptych’ in which the three stages of execution by lethal injection are entwined with beach imagery in a successful extended metaphor:

 

2. Pancuronium bromide (100 mg)

 

Only the fated know when

there are minutes left.  Tied to a plank

at sea, rising over troughs of swell,

the land disappears with each drop.

 

            Slattery is strongest when he harnesses his exuberance to a narrative thread.  ‘The Archaeologist’ is a powerful evocation of childhood and its implications.  ‘Lithographone’ demonstrates his impressive capacity to winkle wondrous imagery out of simple, straightforward, colloquial Australian English.  So also ‘The Slake’:

 

Dad said his back was too stiff

 

to bring in the dead lambs, so we went down

and opened the carcasses for the foxes

to come in after dark and take their hubs.

 

               He’s at his weakest with nonsense verse like ‘Dancey Miscellaney’ …

 

The ladybug does the Boston waltz,

the lobster a high-kicking cancan.

 

             where the poem is not much more than a vehicle for amusing himself with interesting words like  farandole”, “catsrap”, “sarabande”, and “volta.”

 

             Canyon finishes with ‘The Rural Piano Rescue Project’, a long eight-part piece which plays to all of Slattery’s considerable strengths:

 

1. Structure

 

They used the 1912 Esterman upright

to plug a gap in the cow-yard fence.  A yellow

jessamy vine covers its back that faces out

like a dirty gold tooth along the white boundary.

From the other side you can see someone’s kept

the keys glint-clean.  We imagine stock workers;

 

left to bunk under the stars, spilling drink on the keys

as they sing the cows to standing sleep.

 

              This is the sort of poem which can win a major competition, establish a strong reputation, and convince readers to buy the poet’s next book. 

 

            Andrew Slattery is an exceptionally talented new voice in Australian poetry.   He has the craft, the sophistication, and the energy to compete with the very best. Canyon is an impressive milestone, and a worthy contribution to the literature.  At this point in his career, a full-length collection is the anticipated next step.  May it come soon.

 

 

 

 

Douglas Miles on WS Rendra

EVEN MUTTERS CAN MATTER: TEMPTING STUDENTS
WITH THE TASTE OF BAHASA INDONESIA

DOUGLAS MILES
: An Essay On W.S. Rendra

 

 

 

 

W.S. Rendra who enjoyed several visits to Australia, died in Jakarta on the 6 August, 2009 at the age of 74.  I valued a joking relationship with the “Burong

Merak” (= peacock).  He delighted in this soubriquet and successfully nurtured his own media image as a youthful cosmopolitan and energetically flamboyant maverick despite the fact that like Javanese farmers, he always went barefooted and usually dressed entirely in their faded black cotton garments anywhere “off- stage” and as a rule when on it. Indonesian thespians who were younger than he assumed that he was my junior. They called him “mas” (= “gold” as well as “big brother”) but categorised me with the dross of “oom” (=“Dutch uncle”).  Even so, among Indonesian sponsors of my graduate students, it was he who proved to be the most venerably avuncular and persuasively represented the interests of these sometimes difficult expatriates during his occasional formal visits to the Academy of Sciences (LIPI) with a charmingly elegant (alus) but sartorially flawless (rapi) professionalism. Should I now share the secret that he persuaded me 30 years ago (when Suharto’s junta refused him an exit permit) to smuggle his way an urgent consignment of not-so-flamboyant-black hair-dye? Never!

My disconnection from the internet in recent months because of travel spared me the sad news of the death until his Teater Bengkel (Workshop Theatre) unexpectedly contacted me during mid-October with some of the distressing details.  And I certainly was not insensitive in retrospect to the poignancy of my efforts in Europe during the interim to have striven to emulate the characteristic vivacity of Rendra’s own readings of his poetry with my own incomparably ersatz declamations but of course with no mention of his recent passing to any of my audiences. An even greater regret has become my inability to tell him how his work has recently helped me to recruit Western students to the study of his language. But it would be more important to him that teachers who have that responsibility should receive that message in which any doubt they may have that this is so will cease once they have tested the tried and proven pedagogical procedure I exemplify below.

Even so it will be interesting to see whether any of the cognoscenti will gainsay my certainty that Rendra was the most brilliant of the few Indonesian poets and playwrights who managed to emerge from and survive the suffocation of literary creativity for three decades under Suharto’s New Order (late 1960s- mid 1990s). The Smiling General’s regime banned any printing or performance of The Struggle of the Naga Tribe which through the structure of classical Javanese/Balinese shadow puppetry, satirised the royal court in the pseudonymous Astinam (read Indonesia) and hilariously pilloried the Queen (read Mrs Tien -“Ten Percent”- Suharto) as well as her ministers for their vanity, venality and vene …(read the American itches which his dalang, played by Rendra’s wife had all these puppets forever scratching).

His security guard of military police arrested him rather than his assailant when targeted by a bomber while reciting the even more satirical Snapshots of Development in Poetry to the thousands of roisterously applauding aficionados who packed Ismael Mazuki’s roofless Garden Theatre (TIM).  His prosecutors had to invoke a special Emergency Law that he had “provoked the attacker to violence” so that it was the terrorist in mufti who walked free while the poet went to gaol … And not for his longest stint … But what gets under my skin even years later, for nine eternally vermin-infecting months.

The former love lyricist’s originality in eliding the idioms with the sophistries of several languagesultimately defied Wordsworth’s (1800) narrowly effete definition that “poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility (sic) and calls for recognition of the genius Rendra evinced through anything- but- tranquil articulation of authentic and indeed uniquely Indonesian cultural and political priorities in Western literary forms.  The poems he scripted as critiques of the New Order in his own handwriting for his lively readings from the stage became somewhat more than even the finest examples of that art by his most talented contemporaries (e.g. consider his protégé Emha, the theologically muscular Muslim bard).  It was indeed Rendra more than any other of these Indonesian scribblers who transformed the “ho-hum” convention ofCatholic schoolboy elocution at Dutch eisteddfods throughout the colonial Indies into modern Indonesia’s robustly intellectual and iconically political dramatic genre of deklamasi whose magnetism has packed the theatres of Asian capitals and of foreign universities whenever they have delivered to publics and whether domestically or overseas.

Top dissident musicians of the time who were no strangers to the limelights were glad to sit somewhere out there in the darkness before him at home in awe-stricken envy of his command over that ambience. They included glitterati of pop and folk such as Ebiet of country-and-western fame, Mogi Daroessman whom they called the “Neil Diamond of Indonesia” and Gombloh of Lemon Trees. The singers persuaded the declaimers to compose lyrics for them whenever possible as they imbibed the lesson that the thousands of typically illiterate but articulate Jakartans in the surrounding blackness would loudly relish a politically barbed stanza whenever Rendra fired it just as surely as these ghetto-dwellers would flinch at the sharp whiff of a real Betawi curry when a back-alley cook  stirred it : just a slight breath of salty blacan serrated the bite which hallmarked its own  perfection;  no need for these acolytes of Rendra to read some bit of paper like a recipe  to savour either; and no need for them to wear footwear to a  his recital if the price of cheapest thongs challenged their purchase of a ticket.

My tape-recordings vouch for Rendra’s remarkable propensity to draw volcanically creative spiritual energy from his largely barefooted audiences when he composed some of his most inflammatory verses. He would even create new stanzas spontaneously from behind the lectern amid his fire-and-brimstone barrages at the regime’s catechism of national commitment which prioritised ‘Development’ (Pembangunan) over ‘Freedom’ (Kemerdekaan); and the security of censorship over the public’s hunger to know (see below). During intervals in TIM’s dressing room he was genuinely inquisitive when he asked for someone to play back still-smoking lines he had just uttered but never yet read even to himself so that he could scribble them down notably for the first time and ask: “Did I say that or did you just make it up?”  (How I wished I had.)

The specific qualities which constitute Rendra’s artistic greatness also include the many ways with which he transcended cultural differences; for example, with the translingual pun which I understand is an anathema for literary purists.  The device helped him (deliberately?) to induce Western novices into an appreciation of Bahasa Indonesia and uncannily to speak that language sometimes before they even knew they were doing so.  As a mere taste of this magic, I invite the readers to reflect on at least their own whisper of a few lines which the paragraph after next will borrow from “Sajak Mata-mata”.  This “Ode to Spies” enlivens both Snapshots of Development in Poetry (Potret Pembangunan dalam Puisi, Balai Pusaka, 1978) and SOB (State of War and Siege, University of Queensland Press 1979).

Mourners at mortuary gatherings in Australia conventionally request one another to be upstanding and close their eyes to observe a collective silence in memory of the deceased.  I propose that we honour Rendra’s memory equally respectfully by the very opposite of silence and with pupils wide open on the world in rousing declamations of what he wrote even when those who are with us are not all Indonesian speakers. Teachers can do no better than follow his example in providing prospective students of Bahasa Indonesia with such tempting introductions as the following to the creative possibilities of lovingly moulding the clay of the language he mined as the basic material for his wordcrafting.

Consider for instance the duplication which is so well exemplified by a word whose root “mata” means “eye” and which in the internationally now familiar “Mata Hari “translates as “eye of the sky” (= “sun”).  As “mata2”, the root becomes an expression for “spy” or “spies”.  In recent months I have introduced my tributes for Rendra in Europe by drawing attention to that simple feature of Indonesian and then inviting my listeners to participate in an articulation of this poem by quietly voicing  the words “mutter, mutter” as a chorus to contextualize my own declamation from a faulty memory of the following  excerpts from “Sajak Mata2”.

I recalled that the opening stanza of his handwritten notes of which I had kept a few photocopies somewhere back in Australia, began with an allusion to Indonesian newspaper readers urinating provocative gossip on one another to substitute for the facts which the controlled press denied those in the political hierarchy’s lower echelons:

Ada suara gaduh di atas tanah. (aduh2)

Ada suara pi(s)sing kebawah tanah

Ada ucapan-ucapan kacau di antara rumah-rumah.

Ada tangis tak menentu di tengah sawah.

Dan, lho, ini di belakang saya

Ada tentara marah-marah.

 

 I encourage the continuation of the chant of “mutter, mutter” especially to accompany this fifth stanza about censorship and the expression of outrage that:

“……. Aku  tak tahu. Kamu tak tahu.

Tak ada yang tahu..Betapa kita akan tahu,

Kalau koran-koran ditekan sensor,

Dan mimbar-mimbar yang bebas telah dikontrol?

Koran-koran adalah penerusan mata kita.

Kini sudah diganti mata yang resmi.

Kita tidak lagi melihat kenyataan yang beragam.

Kita hanya diberi gambara model keadaan

yang sudah dijahit oleh penjahit resmi.

 

 

Mata rakyat sudah dicabut.”!!…oleh… ?

 

This italicized and highlighted initial line of the sixth stanza translates as

The eyes of the people have been “ripped out ” (like teeth) …by … ?

And the chorus answers with mutter, mutter “ which harmonises with the

declamation’s

“………………………………….mata2

So be it if Auden mused that “Poetry doesn’t (sic) make things happen….”(MascaraEditorial, November, 2009) when decades later on the other side of the globe Rendra’s  talents with ball-point and microphone panicked even the most menacing of the New Order’s managers into seriously self-damaging, political miscalculation under the relentless barrage not only of Rendra’s drama but also of his declamations. Peerless artistic qualities proofed them against competitive cover-up of malpractice by the junta throughout the social system. Remarkably, the contribution of this Indonesian scribbler to the cultural heritage of the oppressed in his country has probably become the best evidence which pundits may ever need to marshal that poetry really does matter (c.f. Parini, 2008).

Even if only a few critics (and Auden) never understood that truth as certainly as Rendra did, he has bequeathed future scholars with an obligation to analyse the chemistry of the breathtaking literary and thespian dynamite he used to achieve its realisation during his own lifetime.  Ma’afkan kenang2an saya yang begini syukurlah, mas; semoga berpulang dengan selamat!

 

 

Doug Miles (Centro In Contri Umani, Ascona Switzerland)

Email: miles.douglas09@gmail.com

 

 

REFERENCES

Mascara, (2009) Editorial, November, https://www.mascarareview.com/editorial.html

Parini, J., (2008) Why Poetry Matters, New Haven, Yale UP

Rendra, W., (1978) The Struggle of The Naga Tribe (translated by Max Lane) Brisbane, University of Queensland Press

Rendra, W., (1978) Potret Pembangunan dalam Puisi, Jakarta, Balai Pusaka

Rendra W., (1979) SOB, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press

Wordsworth, W., (1800) “Observations Prefaced to Lyrical Ballads” in Harmon’s Classic Writings (pp. 279-296)



 

 

Tenzin Tsundue In Conversation With Michelle Cahill

Tenzin Tsundue is a poet, writer and a noted Tibetan freedom activist. He won the ‘Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction’ in 2001. He has published three books to date, which have been translated into several languages. Tsundue’s writings have also appeared in various publications around the world including The International PEN, The Indian PEN, Indian Literature, The Little Magazine, Outlook, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Better Photography, The Economic Times, Tehelka, The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Today (Singapore), Tibetan Review and Gandhi Marg. His work has also been anthologised in Both Sides of the Sky: Post-Independence Indian poetry in English, and Language For A New Century (Norton)

 

 

 

I interviewed Tenzin Tsundue at Rangzen “Freedom” Ashram, Dharamsala in October 2008, some months after he’d been arrested for a march to Tibet. Unfortunately it’s taken a while to present this, but I think Tenzin’s experiences and perspectives are extremely relevant to the political struggles that Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayas continue to face.

In the wake of the recent earthquake in Yushu, Tibet, which has been reported as having occurred in China, as many as 10,000 Tibetans may have perished; the 1300 year old Thrangu monastery has been severely damaged, and many monks have lost their lives. The area has suffered intense political repression since protests broke out across the PRC from 2008 onwards. Being in Dharamsala, witnessing the conditions of Tibetans living in exile and meeting Tenzin was an experience that deeply moved me.            

MICHELLE CAHILL

 

 

MC:     What came first for you, the impetus for political activism or the impulse to write?
 
TT:     Writing was part of the education that I received from school, but even before that, from refugee camps, the first education, the first awareness that came to me is that our country is under Chinese occupation and that we have to some day go back to our country. This shock and lament of having lost one’s country and therefore one’s dignity of life was a huge disturbance for me from childhood. Writing came much later.
 
My concern has always been from childhood that we have to regain the dignity of life from being oppressed, from being a victim, from being a crying refugee to regaining the Independence of Tibet. I don’t want to be a refugee, here, with, or without money, and say that my country is under somebody else’s control. The sense of dignity is very important and if it is not there because I am not in my own country or my own home, the sense of dignity comes from the fact that I’m in the struggle. I’m in the process of regaining that Independence and the struggle is my identity.
 
 
MC:    I’m interested to hear about your education and how that has shaped your journey?
 
TT:     I realised that only my education would assist me to get involved in the struggle and to do anything useful for the struggle. I didn’t have a proper language, and that was my biggest concern. From school we learnt Tibetan and English and even Hindi, right up to the 8th standard. Most of the subjects were taught in English so we had exposure to the English language. But English is always considered the foreign language, the Other language. There was never the culture of spoken English; it was never the culture so therefore it was always the language that you spoke only in your English class. Even in English classes we hesitated and made fun of each other, but we never really got to speak English properly so the feel of the English language both written and spoken wasn’t there, which I think was huge loss and something I had to work very hard on.
 
In most Asian countries now, there are two or three languages being taught. Sometimes you don’t know what your real language is, the language that you feel comfortable with. Just to acquire a proper language was in itself a huge struggle for me. When I went to Madras I was the only Tibetan student in my whole class of 108 students studying English literature and I didn’t have this language. I didn’t have the fluency, the natural feel of the language. So I worked very hard, writing and re-writing.
 
It was only when I was studying my MA in English literature at Bombay University, that I started to write creatively, finding myself in a very supportive atmosphere. We used to have a small poetry circle of friends sharing writings with each other. That was a huge encouragement for me. Outside of class I used to attend readings by senior poets: Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jassawalla, Dom Moraes, Dilip Chitre. These Saturday poetry circles were my training ground. My writing seriously started in 1997, when I was 23. 
 
 
MC:    Many of your poems and essays express a manifested hybridity. You speak of being as much an Indian as a Tibetan. How important is hybridity for diasporic identities in our globalised world?
 
TT:    Well I think this multiple identity is the identity now in this hugely mobile world. And I think patriotism is something that is kind of outdated, internationally. For me my country is in a freedom struggle, but at the same time I’m not in Tibet, confronting the Chinese. I’m in India. I’m born here and I think I’m more effective being here. And being here, realistically, I have to deal with the Indian situation. So having been born and brought up here all my orientation is Indian. I feel I am Indian. At the same time, I feel that I have a huge responsibility for the Tibetan struggle, and I’m most willing to do anything required there. So therefore I do have multiple identities, but I know that the Tibetan cause is the most important cause that I want to dedicate my life towards. There are Indians all over the world. And there are Tibetans living in America and Europe who by virtue of the atmosphere in which they grew up are, in a way, European and American but the kind of priorities they keep for their lives makes a difference.
 
 
MC:    What writers first influenced you?
 
TT:    To begin with it was Khalil Gibran. His love poems and political writings in English were a huge inspiration. I’m thinking of books like Broken Wings, Spirits Rebellious, The Prophet. We used to borrow them from the library and keep them within our circle at school in Dharamsala. There weren’t many who knew about this. We used to go right up into the mountains, and read poetry, and feel that we were reading the most important poem. It became a kind of performance in the jungle. Imagine two or three poets lazing around in the pinewoods, reading poetry to each other and sharing candies; (for one rupee you would get ten small candies.) There was a huge excitement about reading, unravelling, the scenario of the Lebanese struggle, and the freedom struggle that he spoke for. We would read his poems as if they were about us and we could identify with the Tibetan freedom struggle. And that’s how the excitement for poetry began for me.
 
Later on, I read Shakespeare, EE Cummings, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Woeser and Tibetan writers in Tibetan whose new writing captures a kind of a rebellious movement in Tibet. They have been a huge encouragement. I continue to read them and enjoy.
 
 
MC:    In 1997 you crossed into Tibet where you were arrested and tortured. The Tibet you witnessed and described was more Chinese than you had imagined. Do you think the Western world still holds a stereotype of an ancient Tibet, a Shangri-La of Western orientalism and Western cinematic representations?
 
TT:    Sure, I think the Western perspective on Tibet hasn’t improved much; the whole romanticised notion about the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks. But I think what we have been successful in achieving over the past fifty years of living in exile is at least bringing about an awareness of what is Tibet is today. The stereotyping of Tibet as Shangri-La; the land of Buddhas where people lived like angels, levitating and living a superhuman life, I think, was hugely damaging because it immediately recognises Tibetans as not human beings but as interesting characters about whom it is interesting to write about or film.
 
What the Dalai Lama and Tibetans have been able to achieve in the last fifty years is to at least get the West to perceive that Tibet is a parcel of land, whose peoples’ culture is endangered like that of the North American Indians. And so there are tourists who go there and can witness how difficult life is for Tibetans living under the Chinese. This was especially highlighted in 2008 when Tibetans living in Tibet rose up in protest and people in the West were able to see it. So the Western stereotype of Tibet as Shangri-La is shattered. And this is a first success for us. It’s really damaging to look at an entire people and culture as if these are just characters and mythical elements who can be exoticised in cinemas. Films like Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun, do not step beyond the limitations of stereotypes. This is necessary in order for the West to recognise Tibetans as human beings, who have equal capacity for anger, hatred and violence.
 
 
MC:     What is your understanding of the term “cultural genocide”?
 
Cultural genocide is a situation where there’s a disruption in the natural, organic growth of a culture and that disruption has not happened because of a natural disaster but because it’s been artificially imposed. The older generation Tibetans cannot tell the younger generation of what happened in the Cultural Revolution and how much they had to suffer. A silence was created by the political conditions and therefore a whole memory has been erased and hidden. By this strategy, the Chinese government is trying to homogenise the territories that are called China including the occupied Tibet, East Turkishtan, Mongolia and Manchuria. China is flattening all the cultural differences in the name of nationalism. As citizens of China we must practice one culture. Through the practice of population transfer, flooding the occupied lands with Chinese, and basically dictating that the Chinese language is the language of education, administration and media, China is trying to homogenise the culture so its uniqueness will not be recognised. This is what they call a peaceful liberation and the danger is that a whole memory will be erased and people will lose their memories.
 
 
MC:    Is Buddhism and non-violence undermining the political cause of Tibetan independence?
 
TT:    I think what His Holiness is trying to do with the process of dialogue, in itself, is an exemplary non-violent approach. How we want to approach the struggle is confrontational but at the same time non-violent. We want to confront the Chinese dictators and try to address the injustice they are placing on the Tibetans, while his Holiness tries to send delegations, one after the other. But when dialogue is not a sincere process, the dialogue will never work and has not been working. The Chinese try to buy time. In seeking a dialogue we are dependent on them. In confronting and demanding Independence we are not dependent on the dictator, who will never listen, who instead of listening places more conditions on us and therefore tries to stifle whatever little voice we have; a voice that we’ve acquired in exile, in a free country.
 
That freedom we’ve won in exile is the only power that we have to negotiate with the dictator and even that little power we seem to be losing. We prefer to take control of our struggle, confront the Chinese, and demand Independence and refuse to be dependent on the terms of their negotiation. I’m talking about the larger majority of young Tibetans. They absolutely do not trust the Chinese for any type of negotiation, and largely people think that only an Independent Tibet can really guarantee a future for Tibet. Our demand is Independence, our approach is non-violent, but it’s confrontational. It’s not about delegations or round-the-table dialogue.
 
 
MC:    What role do you think the media has played in raising awareness of the struggle for Tibetan Independence?
 
TT:    Being in exile in a free country means that the media is one of our most important partners. China, because of its business interests has to listen to the Western world. The Western world doesn’t voluntarily support Tibet. Sometimes the West uses the Tibet issue to counter China; they find it useful. Sometimes they are forced to take up the Tibet issue in the interests of public diplomacy, because it continues to arise in the international media right in their face. Before the Bejing Olympics, Presidents Bush and Sarkozy had to make statements that the Chinese had failed to keep their promise on human rights because of the brutality by the Chinese government against the Tibetan uprising. Hundreds of Tibetans were killed and thousands were imprisoned. This was openly reported in the Western media. Poland and Germany, in particular were genuinely interested.
 
Australia has a huge stake in Chinese business. Even if Australians would love to support the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people, I don’t think your government is in a position to do anything in favour of the Tibetans while China is actively importing Australian coal and iron ore.
 
 
MC:    You have written about protest as a celebration of difference. But is the celebrity status of the Dalai Lama and his adoring Western fans overshadowing the political cause of a free Tibet?
 
TT:    His Holiness has been created, and has become an icon for peace and sometimes we do feel that he’s becoming more a symbol for peace, and we feel we are missing the Dalai Lama as a Tibetan leader. But I think these are general concerns. The larger-than-life image that he has created is such a power that China is afraid of him. His Holiness has no gun. His Holiness has limited resources that can counteract China but what China fears is the media friendly image of the Dalai Lama. We are only six million Tibetans and China has a population of 1.3 billion, with financial resources and political power, but still in 2008 we shook the political assumptions of the PRC. We own the Dalai Lama’s leadership and power and therefore the Dalai Lama continues to be the symbol of hope for Tibetans, both inside and outside Tibet.
 
 
MC:    Tibetan poets living in exile are writing in their native tongue and in English. But in Tibet, the Chinese language has infiltrated a generation of Tibetans, and has become the language in which they write. Is this a cause for concern?
 
TT:    As it stands, the majority of the Tibetan population are in Tibet and they are speaking Chinese. Chinese has a strong influence in education, administration, economy and the media. The Chinese government has made this mandatory in Tibet. English might become the third language. For those of us born in India, English is the second language or even for some, the first language. The patois of Tibetan and Hindi is not necessarily an undermining of Tibetan culture. There’s a latent fear that results if you start to practise other languages, for example Tibetans are speaking Tibetan but then insert English or Hindi expressions. Also some Tibetans expressions are a direct translation of Hindi. We can observe this in the placement of verbs. In Hindi the verbs are placed first while in English the subject placement occurs before the object is placed. Grammatical shifts, the sentence structure indicates these are direct translation of Hindi. This happens in towns where Tibetans are swelling sweaters by the roadside, which they have been doing for the last 30-40 years, and therefore live that life of direct interaction.
 
There is a cause for concern if our language is being undermined, but at the same time language and for that matter culture is not static, and not something that remains frozen in time. Culture is always in flux; organically developing and we cannot stop it. We may be able to divert it but we are not able to stop it and if we do stop it then that’s the end of the culture. For example if we speak of a genuine Tibetan culture, then this particular phase in the natural flow of our culture is genuine. If we refer to Indian culture, are we talking about post-Independence Indian Culture, are we talking about the Ghandi era, the Moghul period or the Ashoka period? Culture is in a natural flow. We may be able to change its flow organically from constantly evolving but we can’t stop it.
 
So what is happening in exile, is that the kind of Tibetan we are speaking is a very fast pace, with new idioms that we’ve created which were not there in pre-Chinese occupation times. Tibetans inside Tibet today don’t understand us, and we have thus advanced. We have a reason to celebrate that we’ve created a new language. In this new language there are poems being written, songs, novels and essays. Thousands of essays are being written here and it sounds wonderful in this Indian-Tibetan community. Likewise in Tibet with the coming of Communist Chinese they have created amongst themselves, especially during the Cultural Revolution, a lot of idioms that reflect the new revolutionary anti-feudal, anti-Imperialist tones that speak of the glory of socialism. So all these new idioms are created and they are today a part of the Tibetan language, and are confusing to us, and sometimes so Utopian to us. So the Tibetan languages have been evolving both in exile, and in Tibet, and even for Tibetans living in America and Europe. And there are Tibetans in America singing rap songs in Tibetan.
 
 
MC:    What are the possibilities for translation and transcreation of the languages that Tibetans today speak and write?
 
TT:    I think translation and transcreation are very important border areas of literature but presently there are not many poets who have skills in Chinese, Tibetan and English. But I think that increasingly just as the trend is happening in other communities in India, translators are creating a new genre of writing. There is a huge scope of writing and this area will be explored more in time.
 
 
MC:    Do you think that the stories and the memories of the now ageing generation of Tibetans who remember a free Tibet before the Chinese invasion have been adequately preserved?
 
TT:    There is a very rich oral tradition in Tibetan communities. We grew up listening to our parents’ and grandparents’ stories about pre-Chinese Occupation: the fantasy land of Tibet, the heavenly kind of livelihood they lived, the pristine beauty of the natural resources, and the clean water they always described. This is the imagination of Tibet that we grew up on.
 
The imaginative Tibet has been preserved but what we’ve lost in the process is how we became accommodated in boarding schools where hundreds of Tibetan youngsters lived together. We never got to hear and learn from parents and from our ancestors during these times. The memory we lost is how the older generation of Tibetans survived in the economic urgency of creating a livelihood, selling sweaters, working as roadside labourers to earn a living. There was nothing in exile. Tibetan children were sent to school while their parents were earning an income as street vendors. And therefore there was a kind of separation between the two generations and we missed learning from our parents and grandparents.
 
What happened in Tibet was even worse. The Communist cadres used to send informers into the community and they would watch each other. It would happen in areas within China. You were constantly being watched by your own family, your own friends, your own relatives. So you couldn’t do anything considered to be disloyal to the Communist Party. Tibetans inside Tibet could hardly speak about the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the reality of Tibet before the Chinese occupation, and therefore they could not talk about the spirit to fight for freedom. You would be disbanded. Children would be interrogated in this process and if it was found out that they were speaking against the Chinese, they would be guilty of creating a treason.
 
So there was a disruption in the handing over of the memory that we needed to inherit. This is a huge disturbance.  
 
 
MC:    Your poetry seems to differ from Nyam Mgur tradition. It seems less concerned with stylised symbolism and spiritual insight, conveying instead a very real sense of the problems that Tibetans in exile must deal with: a denied sense of home, identity and belonging. Would you like to comment on this?
 
TT:    I’ve read poetry from Tibet; coming from a traditional background as well as new poets writing in a revolutionary style. Their history, education and orientation is very different to mine. I’ve been influenced by India and the influence of English literature. In the expression of writing I don’t really speak in the language of symbolism. My writings are more monologues, a direct communication. I could easily say the same thing or I could read a poem. The language is very simple, and that’s why I think it works, because when it’s heard people identify with it.
 
I don’t feel I write from a traditional style or school of Tibetan writing. Neither do I adopt a spiritual perspective that might be expected of me as a Tibetan or as a follower of the Dalai Lama. It’s more an expression of a person without hope. All my writing is constantly in search of hope. The search of my writing is the process of searching for home, physically or in the imagination.
 
 
MC:    Do you think writers can make a difference to the humanitarian issues that face the politically repressed?
 
TT:    What writers can do is to express concerns and to speak the heart of the common people. They speak the truth; they don’t hide the truth or manoeuvre like politicians. So they are loved by the public. Politicians have to work desperately to win the heart of the people, because they’re never trusted.
 
Because writers tell the truth, they are respected. Naturally they have to bear the responsibility to understand the ground realities; to continue to bear the courage to speak the truth. They can have a huge influence in creating opinions and changing the direction of public opinion.
 
 
MC:    What is your relationship as a writer and an activist to India?
 
TT:    Whether I’m using the language of the writer or the language of the activist, for me the models are always coming from India. Ghandi is a huge influence as well as many other Indian writers: Dilip Chitre, Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar. I’m indebted to the whole Indian environment and the hundreds of Indian friends I have, and how much I’ve learnt from them. Being in Bombay and travelling all over India, and learning from the Indian community are direct influences, and this is my relationship to India.
 
 
MC:    Is there a risk of Tibetan literatures in exile becoming nostalgically repetitive, or without innovation?
 
TT:    No, I don’t think so. Firstly, we are living in a fast pace modern world, especially here in the Tibetan community. So much change is happening, and we are either documenting or responding to these changes that we are witnessing as well as being nostalgic about an imaginative Tibet in exile. I think there are a host of things to write about, and I think that the poetry that’s coming out is very creative in terms of what is being expressed. It’s not just nostalgia. There is truly a voice of anger, frustration with the injustice and the apathy about Tibet from the Western world. There are solid expressions of anger coming from our writers, like the poet Bhuchung D Sonam. I can see that. There’s no concern.
 
 
MC:    What do you think are more important; the verbal or the non-verbal acts of protest and remembrance?
 
TT:    The trouble with non-verbal protest is that it’s transitory unless you have it published or broadcast in the media so that it enters the imagination and the memory of the public. But even that doesn’t help much and you have to be effective in the registering. Today the media with the greatest impact is film and television. But again the problem is that the memory of the broadcast is short-lived. There’s a barrage of cinematic information being targeted at every household. So a protest of climbing the Oberoi Hotel and confronting the Chinese premier is not a memory for Bombay people; it’s not.
 
Written memory is present as a reference and we can broadcast it with the use of technology, by the use of blogs, websites, personal community newsletters. We can personalise and present it. This can’t be erased. I’ve not been able to spend much time as a writer. I’ve spent more time being an activist, organising rallies, getting arrested, being in gaol and fighting court cases. There’s been more of all that and unfortunately less of writing.
 
I think I’ve created a little bit of written public memory.

 

 

Tim Wright Reviews Pam Brown’s True Thoughts

Drinking Water in a Suburb Called Zetland: Notes on Memory and the City in Some Poems by Pam Brown

True Thoughts

by Pam Brown

Salt Publishing, 2008

ISBN:  9781844715152

Reviewed by TIM WRIGHT

 

 

In a recent discussion of the lyric in Australian poetry on her blog[i], Pam Brown wrote of her poetics that she was interested in ‘the occurrence of ‘the current’’. The current here could be both ‘the contemporary’ or ‘the present moment’, the moment of writing. In her latest collection True Thoughts this interest in the current merges with an ongoing interests in memory and place (particularly the local). The past and present appears often as a duality in the collection, along with others: stillness and movement, inside and outside, this way or that way, here or there. The poems’ mode is kinetic, they proceed by indirection[ii].

 

Brown’s noted critical take on the everyday – and sometimes hyper (and anxious) self-reflexivity – is integrated into the practices and habits around work, leisure, friendships, travel, reading, and writing. The title is plural: ‘thoughts’ as in products; not ‘thought’ as process. The poems are less about the kind of thinking exemplified by Rodin’s Thinker, an absorbed stillness; instead thoughts occur, one after another, amidst and in response to movement, radio, traffic, mobile phones. Thinking takes place in a city, and so the possibilities or potentialities latent within it become part of the thinking process. Subject and object are often captured on the move, going somewhere else. Glimpses of the poet appear – catching a train to work or sitting at a desk to read – alongside and simultaneous with records of various kinds of mental action: observing and noticing, worrying, hesitating, remembering or speculating on conversations with other writers and friends, making a decision.

 

The poems don’t lend themselves to scholarly close reading; they wriggle out from under the microscope; they don’t seem to me to be coded or contained in the way that that method, at some level, implies. They share concerns of memory, and a responsibility to continue thinking politically and humorously in an increasingly fragmented contemporary. About half of the poems are more than three pages long, and move by branching, link-and-node formations: shape mimics thought. I read the poems as a book length work; not quite a sequence, but a collection in which chronology is important. I suspect that a way of reading (or listening) to the poems is required that is more open to distraction – a state the poems themselves are written through – one which could skip across the poems, read them glancingly and let them go out of focus as much as reading lines and words in a sharply focussed way. In a sense this is simply to read in the spirit of the poems themselves. They are not, I think, written as contained aesthetic objects to be regarded. The poems (and their ‘speaker’) proceed by way of indirection, and this is realised in the heightened attention and care given to line breaks – those points of the from which it could ‘go anywhere’ (as one poem says). The anywhere is not fantastic – an escape – but a state of (distracted) openness to possibility which the poems want to maintain, to keep in the air. It is productive to think of them, for a moment, alongside the ‘talk poems’ of the contemporary American poet David Antin. Antin has explained that his style of poem comes from wanting ‘to think about things that are worth thinking about that lead to more thinking[iii]‘.

 

The two opening poems, ‘Existence’ and ‘Amnesiac Recoveries’ are responses to the US war in Afghanistan, and the Iraq war as it proceeded from dreaded possibility to reality in the summer of 2003. JS Harry’s ‘Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003” (from Not finding Wittgenstein, 2007) and Jennifer Maiden’s George Jeffreys sequence (from Friendly Fire, 2005) are important reference points, being the major Australian poems I know of written in response to the second Iraq war. Where Harry and Maiden use fictional characters to imagine Baghdad, Brown’s response is autobiographical, remaining ‘herself’, in Sydney. In this context the description of a swim in harbour that opens the poem ‘Amnesiac Recoveries[iv], seems luminous, a luxury, when posed against the knowledge of the distant war:

 

            2002

            I get away

                        from the academy

            and                   after breakfast

            dip in the green harbour

                           under sprinkling rain.

 

            I know the war continues.

                 on  tv

                     in the background of the frame

            the investigator yawns.

 

The speaker is both part of, and separated from the unnamed war by a screen. She is, after all (as I am), Australian, a citizen of one of the countries involved in the war, and so, in an obscure sense, involved. I borrow the word from the last lines of John Forbes’ ‘Love Poem’, perhaps the most subtle Australian poem to do with the first Gulf War[v]. The final lines of Forbes’ poem have its speaker watching the televised bombing during the Gulf war of 1991, knowing, ‘ … obscurely, as I go to bed / all this is being staged for me’. Brown’s poem also ‘knows’ the war mediated by a TV screen, but doesn’t stage the same moment of laconic epistemology; it sets the image, moves on to something else.

 

The poem is noteworthy for how it plots different points across the city, passing through three different environments, from the desiccated university to breakfast to the green harbour in three lines. The searching and questioning provoked in Australia by the wars – about what it meant to be a citizen as well as a writer, an artist, or a poet – are explicit in the poem, and haunt the collection. There’s an awareness that there is possibly more at stake now than then, but also that the ideals and lifestyles of the seventies and eighties have largely disappeared, and that certainties about politics and political affiliations have become more complicated and more fragmented. Ken Bolton has noted of this collection that ‘[t]here is a lot of lying down, small rests, boredom defeated—but also, to a degree, a withdrawal from the game, beyond maintaining solidarity with others’ humanity . . .[vi]‘ .  Simultaneously, there is a will to continue, and to continue thinking in the face of what often feels overwhelming; this is apparent in the plural title (‘Amnesiac Recoveries’) which suggests a series of shocks that each bring about a return to awareness (of history, of politics) from a state of amnesia. The poem continues:

 

            that empty-to-the stomach feeling

                as I enter the building

                     to begin

            my twelfth year of toil

 

            I know how to fix everything

              but, obstinate in my resolve,

                                        withdraw.

 

            who here

              would phone Interflora

                         for your funeral

 

There is clearly a self-conscious eye observing the poet’s gloominess in these lines. While moods such as these reoccur in the collection, they’re rarely entirely dark. As much as in earlier collections, Brown’s poems are humorous, and anxious–the James Schuyler quote ‘I order you: RELAX’ is a favourite–as they record the attempts of a person to make sense of the new decade, and a new, disappointing, age brought about by those wars. The poems attempt to register that disappointment, but also to try and unlock keyholes to counter it. At the end of the title poem from his 2003 collection, Kieran Carroll made a distinction between decades when he noted the change from the 80s to the ‘slicker, mentally tougher 90s[vii]. These two poems and others in the collection seem to be an attempt to do something similar, to find a word for the first decade of the 2000s, to try to understand what is and what was unique about it. By staying close to the body, by not protecting the poems from the grotty everyday and the ephemeral (the ‘tangled crepe-paper streamers,/napkins, plastic plates/& other picnic junk’ left after Australia Day), and also by stubbornly resisting, most of the time, to ‘get metaphysical’, the poems feel out an attitude for existing politically now, one that is as subject to distraction, mood, and change as a mind and a body are.

 

The first poem in the collection, ‘Existence’ shares many of the concerns of ‘Amnesiac Recoveries’, and could be read as a companion poem. It begins:

 

            from here on in

            if I follow

            the girl in the

                    ‘your tv

                    hates you’

            sweatshirt       as her motorcyclist

            warms his darkly bubbling engine

            ready to blur

            into a field of speed

            it’s probably

            one less path

            to torpor

                            for me

 

~

 

            a dishwasher whirrs above me

            a slab separates us –         water restrictions

                                                                      mean nothing

 

            war

            is

            imminent,

            Sydney goes sailing

 

The imminence of war suggests that both poems were written at around the same time: a Sydney summer with its rain, heat and frangipanis smeared on the footpath. Both poems, too, juxtapose the luxuriance and privilege of water (sailing, sparkling waves, the ‘Rose Bay Afloat’) with the obscured, but still dimly apparent, ‘rest of the world’ that the water separates Australia from. As with most poems in the book, other lives appear only as strangers observed, emails, the trace of a life through the whirr of a neighbour’s dishwasher. As an opening poem it flags some of these themes of the book: Sydney, war, memory, and finding ways to continue.  

 

The anti-war poems are followed by five written during a residency in the Trastevere in Rome. Most of the rest–about two thirds of the collection–seem to take place in or around contemporary Sydney. Memory and the city emerge explicitly as themes in ‘Saxe Blue Sky’ and ‘Train Train’, which detail two Sydney train journeys, one from the leafy eastern suburbs into the city, the other down from the Blue Mountains and past the sprawl of the western suburbs. ‘Saxe Blue Sky’ begins with a train journey to work. One of the things I like about this poem is the particular stretch of train journey it describes. As the train comes out of Kings Cross tunnel the passenger seems to float for a few hundred metres, about half a minute, over a zone of the city which is a crammed mix of the old and the hypermodern. It passes over the housing commission terraces and luxury apartments of Woolloomooloo, the towers along William Street in the distance, the Cahill Expressway, and for a moment beside the Art Gallery and the Domain. Bookended by two tunnels—one into Kings Cross and the other into Martin Place—the experience is highly cinematic down to the jumpcut beginning and the sudden fade to black as the train hits the tunnel. Local landmarks are registered: Brett Whiteley’s ‘burnt match/live match’ sculpture outside the Art Gallery of NSW, a bronze frieze on the gallery wall. Soon the speaker looks away from the train window, down to a set of catalogue cards she will need to go through once she gets to work:

 

            cards detailed with

                                 pencilled handwriting,

                traces of old colleagues

                                                        now moved on.

The process of recording information onto a card by impression becomes analogous here to how memory can become "impressed" in material things, and here patina becomes important to thought over surface smoothness. What stays the same in a city over time? The poem details those things which persist: icons (the Harbour Bridge), identities (Brett Whiteley), official histories (plaques). Yet there is a frustrating weakness of visual memory, and the way it plays out in the experience of living in the city:

                            I remember most of them,

            more,       I remember their memos,

            circulated notes—

                               our names listed,

                           stapled to a corner,

            memo read,  name ticked,    then passed along

                                                      to the next name—

                        pre-email

 

The scripts of these old colleagues produce an encounter that’s placed parallel to those official histories embedded in the city, which flash past but leave little impression. One of the questions asked throughout the book is how to remember while avoiding the stillness, or endless replay of nostalgia (which in this case might be the colonial architecture of The Rocks). Cities change, taking memories with them, and so actively remembering former iterations (taking notes, documenting in some personal, experiential way) is a method of resisting what in ‘Amnesiac Recoveries’ is termed ‘memoricide’ – the bombed Baghdad library. Brown’s poems stay close to the built environment, and pay attention to inscription in all its forms (shops signs, old notes, memos…). Rather than history, it might be more useful to think of Brown’s concern with the materiality of memory in terms of heritage. Heritage as ‘that which we’ve inherited’, or ‘that which we are heir to’, allows a connection to history at the interface with the built environment. The political question then becomes, How is it decided what gets kept? In the poem, the sifting, sorting, chucking-out process that will shortly take place with the old cards could be the architectural model version of an answer: personal archivism.  

 

The poem, ‘Today there is much more heritage than there used to be’, develops this concern while addressing a friend in hospital. The poem moves between several views, the ‘in situ’ view of the speaker, imagined views onto the Harbour, either from Brereton’s house or hospital, to a less inspiring view of a tv from her hospital bed. The poem begins,

 

            built between the wars,

                       acts of social optimism,

               our anachronistic homes

                          but,    or,    even,    so

                           we live in them,

            sought after charm emblems.

 

            in the block next to mine

                              a gang of workmen

            is hurling the walls

                              and the tea break

                              and the lunch

                                            out the windows,

            bricks and door frames

                             plastic forks and curry packs,

                                           like storm debris,

            hurtling

                   like           broken twigs

                                  across the car park

 

~

 

            a lightning flash

                       interrupts computing

            I imagine your stormy view

                                  over Elizabeth Bay,   beautiful

                           night-dark,      night-light,

                          small boats tossing and slicing

                                                through the bay

            (how

            do such tiny blinkings

                                                 guide them?)

                         towards Clark Island

            or heading back

                                   to the illuminated city

 

The poem transitions between contrasting scenes (day and night, land and water), blending interior and exterior with the lines ‘a lightning flash / interrupts computing’. It suggests a kind of noir city imaginary that the poems work out of. The poem ends comically, with the poet on her knees waxing the bathroom tiles, and the realisation that ‘a resemblance of heritage’ is ‘as near as we’ll get’.

 

Brown’s poetry might be usefully thought of both in terms of the flâneuse and of the bricoleur, but also of the rag-gatherer, that other nineteenth century Parisian character, collector of what the city dwellers considered of little value. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes Laforgue of Baudelaire, ‘He was the first to write about himself in a moderate confessional manner, and leave off the inspired tone.’ The description is reminiscent of the self-deprecating voice of many of Brown’s poems. The quote continues:

 

            He was the first to speak of Paris from the             point of view of one of her daily             damned (the      lighted gas jets flickering with             the wind of prostitution, the             restaurants, and their air             vents, the hospitals, the gambling, the logs resounding as             they are sawn and then dropped on             the             paved courtyards, and the chimney             corner, and the cats, beds, stockings, drunkards,             and modern perfumes) – all in          a noble, remote and superior             fashion . . . The first also      who accuses himself             rather than appearing             triumphant, who shows his wounds, his laziness,             his             bored uselessness at             the heart of this dedicated workaday century, its strange             decor:             the sad             alcove . . . and to take pleasure in doing so[viii]

 

The ‘Haussmannization’ of old Paris in the nineteenth century, the period when Baudelaire was writing, might be the ‘Meritonization[ix]‘ of Sydney in the twenty-first. There are less smells to encounter, and not so many logs-being-sawn-and-then-dropped to listen to, but a pleasurable ‘bored uselessness’, certainly evident in Brown’s poetry, might be as effective a strategy as it was for Baudelaire. For Brown, the city is a grid for making sense of experience, as well as a mnemonic. The poems map the movement of thought as it occurs in a city space. The spare, pared back lines span outwards seeming to collect details. And while she is attentive to the world outside, she seems to be happy to not let it cohere: questions are permitted to stay unanswered, odd irregularities are often placed in the poem as readymades.

 

Rather than the smoothly flowing motion of the car or bike, the poems move at walking pace, and with the memory of its rhythm, are able to turn around and backtrack. Brian Massumi’s appealing idea of walking as ‘controlled falling’ is a reminder that walking is as much a product of resistance, each step being the arrest of a potential fall, as it is volition. Brown’s writing proceeds, it seems to me, with this necessary resistance, by cutting lines short. One step, then another; one thought, then another. The distractions of a city street are rendered in the short lines and variations in spacing across the page. Brown celebrates the pleasures of distraction, of being able to go ‘in any direction’. At times this distraction resolves into crystalline moments of attention. The first two short poems are from ‘Zennish’, a series of short poems from the earlier collection, 50/50, the third from Little Droppings, a chapbook of out-takes from the collection This World, This Place:

 

 

thirty shades

of mirrored

sunglasses —

I

like the look

of a lucozadey amber

 

~

 

ah,

the little dose

of gamma radiation

I

was given

at the clinic

 

~

 

Drinking water

in a suburb called

Zetland

 

 

There is a singular state of attention present in these poems. Duchamp’s concept of the inframince, or the ‘ultrathin’, provides a useful context for these poems. Some of the well-known examples Duchamp gives are the sound of corduroy pants rubbing against each other, the difference in volume between a freshly washed shirt and a shirt worn for one day, the taste of one’s mouth lingering in exhaled smoke. It is these attenuated feelings, Brown’s poems suggest, that make up an everyday plane of affective experience. There is a resistance to explanation in the three line ‘Zetland’ poem, a trust in language to do the work. We are not told who is in Zetland, or why, or indeed what Zetland is: the name could be a 1920s version of a future city, with its ribbon-like freeway overpasses and hovercrafts. In fact, the name derives from the former name for the Shetland Islands – I discovered this by punching it into Google. It is a suburb in an inner but slightly hidden-away, often overlooked, part of Sydney; rapidly gentrifying. 

 

True Thoughts is populated by screens, junk technology, litter, buildings, freeways and cars, public transport, water (the harbour, the beach, the dishwasher), brand names, and now and then, glimpses or traces (archival, memory traces) of other lives. The poems often alternate between exterior and interior spaces (the interior of a train carriage and the view through the window; the flash of lightning illuminating a study desk sitting at the computer) and this is paralleled to the constantly changing relationship between thought and the outside environment. Brown’s poems, her forms, are ‘true thoughts’, at the level of the nagging ethical worries, as well as the jingle reverberating in a mind interrupting more serious thought, or the overheard conversation. They attempt to remain open to experience in an age of (that potentially optimistic phrase) ‘late capitalism’.



 


[i]          [http://thedeletions.blogspot.com]

[ii]     The phrase is from Edward S. Casey’s chapter title ‘Proceeding to Place by Indirection’ from the book The Fate of

      Place: A Philosophical History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997/98

[iii]    ‘A Conversation with David Antin, with host Charles Bernstein and questions from Penn students’, University of Pennsylvania – March 16, 2004 [http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Antin.php]. A fuller quote reads: ‘I have a distaste for the jewel-like work, which I don’t tend to do very often as you can probably agree. I also don’t like it. That is in some sense I’d like to produce an object that’s an action. And it’s an action that leads to actions by others: mental actions or human actions. And on the other hand I don’t want it to be simply talk .. In a certain sense, simple talk that isn’t engaged with trying to figure something out or think something through, dissipates too rapidly for what I want to do, I want to think about things that are worth thinking about that lead to more thinking. I want to do thinking that leads to thinking.’

[iv]                Taken from a longer collaboration with Susan Schultz, housed in the Department of Dislocated Memory, at the     

                     International Corporation of Lost Structures [http://www.icols.org/pages/PB&SS/PB&SS.html]

[v]     I refer to the final poem in Forbes New and Selected Poems (1992), not the poem of the same name from Damaged Glamour (1998).

[vi]    Ken Bolton, from a review of True Thoughts unpublished at the time of writing

[vii]    ‘ The Night I saw Terry Alderman Dancing to Nick Cave at Chasers’, from the collection of the same name, Ginninderra Press, 2003

[viii]   Convolute J, ‘Baudelaire’, The Arcades Project (1999) Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p. 246

[ix]    Meriton is a large construction firm, responsible for many apartment block developments in Sydney.

Natalie Owen-Jones Reviews Storm and Honey by Judith Beveridge

Storm and Honey

by Judith Beveridge

Giramondo Press, 2009

ISBN 9781920882563

http://www.giramondopublishing.com/storm-and-honey

Reviewed by NATALIE OWEN-JONES

 

 

 

 

 

Storm and Honey is Judith Beveridge’s fourth major volume of poetry. Her first two, The Domesticity of Giraffes, and Accidental Grace, established her as one of the finest voices in Australian poetry, and her third, Wolf Notes, gave this status an enigmatic depth and lustre. In many ways Storm and Honey reminds us of what an important book Wolf Notes is. Within this more recent work continues a quality of breath and line and a confidence with subtle states of mind that was first given to us in those poems. More specifically, the idea of writing a sequence through the lens of a fisherman and documenting life on a working trawler continues an interesting theme in her writing. In ‘From the Palace to the Bodhi Tree’ in Wolf Notes, and the ‘Buddha Cycle’ in Accidental Grace, Beveridge also writes from within character. The poetic speaker in the Bodhi Tree cycle is the Bodhisattva, the sequence imaginatively following his journey, physical and mental, from his life as a prince to the moment when his search for enlightenment is about to be fulfilled.  In ‘Buddha Cycle’ it is the monks and laypeople surrounding the Buddha’s life – many of whose stories are drawn from the Pali cannon itself – who speak the poems, representing the Buddha himself as an effective absence, shining at the centre of their experiences.

 

Yet despite the sequence, on first glance, ‘Driftgrounds: Three Fisherman’, marks an abrupt turn in Beveridge’s poetic. Moving a long way from the non-violence and search for ultimate peace of the Buddha cycles, these poems do not temper the brutality of fishing – the suffering, the stench and death that are a part of that life. Her language revels in the harsh, visceral opportunities offered through the exploration of the fishermen’s lives. Its beautiful meditations, however – ‘Morning, up river’, ‘At the Inlet’, for example – do represent fishing’s other side, the contemplative moments offered by a life on water. Driving both of these, at least outwardly very different themes in her work, is the importance of experience and the acknowledgement of the reality of suffering to Beveridge’s poetry. The importance of bodily experience to the life of the mind finds its own expression in poetry and she invites us, in this volume, to think of this expression as refiguring and bringing into focus far away worlds: the fishing life, sea creatures, the minds of others.

 

Experience has a hold on this volume’s poems, in the way its words feel on the tongue and to the eye and this animates more than the violence of trawler life. Her poems range wildly across language through sound and ingenious simile and her playfulness – more acute in this volume than in others – acts in a similar way to the creation of her fisherman and her portraits of other men of the sea. It offers a lens through which to view this other, and ultimately our own, world. The opening poem announces the volume’s fascination with sound as it describes the awful scene of a child’s body being removed from inside a shark:

 

We heard the creaking clutch of the crank

as they drew it up by cable and wheel

and hung it sleek as a hull from the roof.

 

The poem offers a glimpse of the nature of the sequence’s three main characters, the narrator, Davey and Grennan:

 

                                                            The limb’s

            skin had already blanched,  a sight none

            of us could stomach, and we retched,

 

            though Grennan, cool, began cutting off

            the flesh in knots, slashing off the flesh

in strips; and then Davey, flensing and

 

flinching, opened up the stomach and

the steaming bowels.

 

Positioning the narrator as the more sensitive one, the writing moves from nauseating detail to cold fact. Speaking of the gulls overhead, ‘Still they taunt us with their cries’, he says, as ‘Grennan with a tool / took out what was left of the child’ (15). 

 

This first poem sets a shadow of death across the volume. The next, ‘The Trawlers’, speaks more generally about the fishermen’s working life, and introduces writing, language, poetry itself, as another of the sequences most insistent themes:

 

The broken northern cliff face and tidal rips still

            driving across the rocks. The lighthouse on the headland

            like a valve that blew its incandescence decades ago.

            The trawlers are slanting, moving across thick dossiers

            of water, the wind dictating, urgent, demanding

 

            a copybook hand. (16)

 

This is not the only time the speaker describes weather in writing metaphors, nor has a particular focus on time. Beveridge often uses intriguing and quite beautiful constructions where, for example, something is ‘still’ occurring, something else ended a long time ago, and ‘soon’ something else will arise. It is a persistent awareness in her poems that deserves more attention than I can give it here, and I suspect it is tied to her recurring figures of the moon and weather. It opens her poems to endless possibility. The language and poetry metaphors are more specific to this sequence (there are many playful references to Octopuses and their ink) and drive, I think, its intricate inner logic that points not so much to its being made up of poems about fisherman as painting portraits of fisherman-as-poets. The speaker says in ‘Inlet’:

 

            I know my stroke will lose rhythm in the brown        

                        waters of the cove, but now I make

            curved passage across the bay where even Grennan

           

            or Davey on the far-off jetty, their reels spinning

                        like a sudden volley of insects

            cued by the dusk, might, just possibly – when

                        they come into the presence

            of still waters – find something beautiful to say. (23)

 

And after this mention of beautiful speech, the next two poems speak of the other two fisherman, Davey first, then Grennan, in their own adventures towards poetry – in the case of Davey, a percussive adventure in sound: 

 

                                    …I like a reel to sound as if it ground shell grit,

                        I like it to bitch-box its hisses, I like the full

 

                        clack and brattle and not just have it chitter

            like a sorry crab. (‘Tackle’ 24)

 

In ‘The Knot’, Grennan’s tying a knot is like ‘signing a run of verses, / or psalms in the deaf-dumb alphabet’, the narrator marvelling at how ‘hands [that] have felt the cold brutality of the sea / and lugged nets of killing across the shallows, can make / the tiny twists and turns and conjugate beauty’ (26). If these poems, or even the sequence itself, can be thought of as portraits of the fishermen as poets, it would not be surprising to realise that many of the sequence’s other poems, ‘Lingo’, ‘Delancy’, and ‘Weaver’, for example, are also portraits of the characters the fishermen come across at sea. ‘Capricorn’ is another, the final poem of the sequence and, I think, its finest. It reminds me that the book is dedicated to her son, and opens with the metaphor of a lens –something the sequence offers us pervasively, as I mentioned earlier, through its personas and its language:

 

            Through the end of an old Coke bottle he tracks

                        the flight of a petrel until it is tattered by

            sea wind and another blurred mintage of the sun.

                        Along the pier he hears the men with their

            reels, with their currency of damp sand. His rod

                        quivers, weighted not with fish, but with

 

            the names of storms: Harmattan, Vendavales,

                        turbid winds running the vanguard of

            dangerous straits.

 

Do these lenses refigure reality or make it clearer? In tune with childhood, here, it becomes a portal for the imagination: ‘But now the bottle is a horn,’ the speaker says, ‘into / which he pours so much breath’. Closing the sequence with a lovely symmetry by recalling the child of the opening poem, these lines open into the free potential of the mind, where the first closed onto mortality:

 

                                                      Ah, but you know, if

                        you were to take this child’s hand; if you

            were to keep his gaze in yours and wait for

                        each circulation of his breath; if you were

            to watch the pirated scenes of daydreams

                        play out through a windfall of glass, then

 

            you’d see the copper-coloured sun. You’d walk

                        this beach a long time with your thoughts

            trading in weather and wind, the petrels keeping            

pace with the rakish lines of dreams

            sailing in with the clinker-built storms.

                       

This freedom is a condition of a literary imagination, the poem goes on to say. It is its weapon to ward off death, although this manoeuvre reminds us of death’s ubiquity:

 

                                                            No, the world

            would not be a wave repeating its collapse,

 

            but whatever mintage of story a boy can find

                        among fish scales, sand and the common

issuance of wind; a boy who knows nothing

                        of the linkages between storms; nor of

            the men, yet, who log weather’s quick decay

                        onto gauges of abuse; who knows nothing

            about paying for that old voyage toward death. (60-61)

 

 

The last poems, collected under the heading ‘Water Sapphire’, are often rhapsodic, celebrating poetry’s ability to circle and illuminate a topic or thing or word. They are playful meditations on a word’s sound – as in ‘Apaloosa’, on cockatoos and the mosquito. One of this section’s most brilliant poems, ‘The Binoculars’, speaks again of the sea: of sea-birds, and the speaker’s father’s love of watching them and of his friend, Harvey, who fell to his death while doing it. Revisiting the cabinet in which her father locked Harvey’s binoculars, she

 

                                                                             …levelled

them to the back of the room and saw what looked

to be the sky in mauve-grey, sea mist patterns

full of flecks like the birds I could never bring

to view.

 

She remembers then that once she

 

                                    …saw him again clasping Harvey’s

            binoculars between his knees, working the prisms

            and the light-gathering lenses he’d removed back

into place – and slowly sealing into each intricate

chamber as much as he could of Harvey’s ashes. (76-7)

 

It is tempting to read this final image as an overarching metaphor for the volume, but I do not want to simplify its rich mystery. Beveridge’s poetry requires us to ask the question – which crystallises in this particular collection and, moreover, in its figure of the lens – is poetry essentially facing itself, addressing itself and mining the bright core of language to illuminate its hold on us? Or does it face outwards to the world, bring us the world and open our minds to realities we have not yet experienced? The glass of ‘The Aquarium’, the final poem of the book, might be seen as another type of lens, one through which the speaker views so many of those creatures that appeared in ‘Driftgrounds’ as dead, now with wonder at their alien lives:

 

            The weirdest things are the tiny cuttlefish,

            the ones whose translucent, gelatinous faces

                                           are hung with the rippling curtains

            of their feeding tentacles. Their locomotion-frills are wafting too,

                        fine as chiffon.

 

She pulls these creatures close to us and pushes them away with wonderful similes, making them at once familiar and deeply strange. After describing the virtuosic acrobatics of the octopus, with another gesture of symmetry her last image is the shark:

 

            I go back to watch the octopus again whose arms now

            seem to be conducting music to four distinct orchestras.

                        Then it plays with one of the small rings put there for its

                   amusement –

            and in a flash

   as though its were a length of voile or Dacca silk, it draws

all four meters of itself through the ring’s small hole

                        shape-shifting then tightening

             its small face against the glass before it holds the rim

      of the ring again, and it draws itself back through

                        as if into another portal, another hole in space.

 

But even after this, it’s that shark I can’t forget –

         how it’s eyes keep staring, colder than time – how it never

                   stops swimming,

                          how it never closes its mouth. (86)

 

Perhaps speaking of poetry here, perhaps of the terror of death, it is a wonderful image to close a collection that holds the difficult tension between the two.

 

Beveridge’s is a poetry that keeps an exact and beautiful balance, as if she intuits a point of stillness where each line, each poem, comes to be complete. I often think that the heron, which appears so frequently in her work, is something of a symbolic totem bird. Her poems hold themselves open to the possibilities of time, of chance, of the ‘if only’ of the imagination, yet step with a similar delicate surety:

 

            Near the pier another heron is holding its bill over the reeds

 

            as purposeful as a seiner with a marlinspike, before it

jabs then returns to its wire-drawn stance, as if all it must

achieve now is to lift and pull itself into the distance

like sail twine.

 

 

And look! how they stand – at last – stilled to perfection. (‘Herons at Dusk’ 80)

 

 

Kim Cheng Boey Reviews Aria by Sarah Holland-Batt

Aria

by Sarah Holland Batt

University of Queensland Press

2008

ISBN 9780702236754

http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/index.php

Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY

 

Poetry is about finding the image that will suffice, that will embody the complex of emotion and thought possessing the poet’s body and soul. It is about finding concrete details that have a special resonance, and creating from a few particulars an entire mood or landscape. Sarah Holland-Batt possesses this gift in abundance. She has the attentiveness for the telling detail, and the mastery of making magic of familiar things. In poems of startling freshness and immediacy, Holland-Batt bridges the quotidian and visionary worlds in vivid acts of seeing, and reminds us of poetry’s power to renovate, to restore delight in ordinary things.

 

In an age where there are so many poems and poets flaunting their postmodernist opacity and reducing language to a vaguely apprehensible vaporous flow until nothing remains in the reader’s head, it is refreshing and heartening to encounter a young poet who values lyric clarity, and who, though gifted with art of seeing and turning ordinary things into arresting metaphors, does not disdain to use plain speech to say the most profound things. This gift is evident in the moving “The Sewing Room,” a tribute to the poet’s mother, its tactile touches reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s elegies for his mother:

 

My mother measured the margins

of my known world there:

a sunlit annex where the lines converged,

wrist to shoulder-blade, hip, ankle, waist;

maps I would only outgrow

charted in painstaking tailor’s chalk.

 

The image and moment are precisely delineated, and the iconic figure of the mother working her Singer wonderfully captured: “sometimes a foxtrot, sometimes a waltz,/ she treadled the pedal with a pianist’s touch.” The concluding sestet echoes the last lines in Robert Hayden’s father poem “Those Winter Sundays” (“What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”):

 

            What did I know of making then,

            rearranging a few sad odds and ends

under my mother’s pinned smile,

her teeth interspersed with ersatz test?

The overlocker zagged on like a lie-detector test.

I kept watch. It never leapt.

 

The affection, the mother-daughter bond is never stated but conveyed through the telling details, the terse sentences in the last line contrasting poignantly with the preceding aggregate of subordinate clauses, noun and preposition phrases to suggest the inadequacy of language in expressing the mother’s selfless love.

 

Holland-Batt reveals a Keatsian apprehension of the world around her that yields up refreshing physical details. In a few weaker poems, this silts up the movement of the lyric, but when this rich vein is balanced by a Chekhovian spareness, Holland-Batt reveals a mature mind that makes her one of the most compelling poets to emerge in recent years. This balance is most apparent in the family portraits, where the precision of detail works hand in glove with lyric cadence and restraint to create deeply poignant tributes. In “Exhaustion” the little concrete details piece together a whole life:

 

One afternoon I went into his silent study

and found, behind the tiny compartments

of paper-clips, rubber bands and push-pins,

an old, red tin – the relic of my grandfather’s oils,

wedged at the back of things. Horse-hair brushes,

graphite stubs, a frayed bit of string. And nestled in

the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,

a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end

folded over and over until nothing was left.

 

The last detail resonates endlessly in the reader’s mind, as a lasting emblem of the grandfather’s life and memory. There are other moving familial poems that echo Robert Lowell (Holland-Batt acknowledges her debt in “Letter to Robert Lowell”), but Heaney is a more palpable influence in the portraits of the father, in “Atonement” and in “The Woodpile,” which is inspired by the figure of the poet’s father splitting “rounds of wood”:

 

Nights were cold; my father’s breath,

blue as exhaust while he chopped, stunning each

block in two with the blade’s glottal stop

although the cold kept coming on no matter

how hard he struck.

 

The sensuous weave of alliterative and assonantal sounds and the use of vivid kinetic verbs are Heaneyesque, marrying memory and lyric form in a reverential gesture.

 

Poem after poem in the collection exhibits a Keatsian sensuality, an alert eye and ear that capture all the nuances of emotion and thought through physical detail.  “Circles and Centres” is unabashed in its use of adjectives, the long train of images breathing rapture:

 

You are being called. All the garden

around the house is as planets in orbit,

its slim persimmons and cumquats, their shocks

of rind, the pumpkins viridian and grooved

like distorted grenades, plump wattle in sprays

rattling its sweet dust into your eyes and nose.

 

Heaney is again audible in the digging motif and vivid verbs:

 

You are digging, digging against it,

possibly for an end; going around the perimeter

of you plot, wielding your ability to crimp

and cinch and singe like a new addition

to your vocabulary.

 

The poem locates a liminal instant between the outside and indoors, between the self and other. It digs deep into the moment, and while the language is beautifully evocative, it is one of the few poems where the gift for imagery runs aground on its own excess.

 

Holland-Batt, like Jane Hirshfield and Linda Gregg, has the ability to tune in to the mystery of ordinary things. There is a Zen-like attentiveness, and the ego disappears in a concentrated moment of seeing:

 

            Will you come back from the other side?

 

                                             No, but the world will still know me.

 

            And how will it know you?

 

                                              In the black cricket’s song.

                                              In the throat

                                              of all things burning.

 

There is a remarkable precision and economy of language, and a haunting acoustic, a captivating music that holds up the visual image.

 

Music, as theme and metaphor, permeates the work. The longer poems that with musical motifs – “Rachmaninoff’s Dream” and “Aria for a Painted Dancer” – stumble and lose clarity, the rich word-hoard cluttering up the movement, but “Misery and Pizzicato” delivers that ominous chord in Mahler’s tragic oeuvre memorably:

 

Morning, thinking of Mahler

in nineteenth-century Austria,

who was told Jews were not welcome

at the Vienna Opera – composer or no.

He turned Catholic, and joked.

‘I have just changed my coat,’

then went home and marked the violins

in his seventh symphony ffff, with a note:

pluck so hard that the strings hit the wood.

 

Again the economy and exactitude are impressive: in a short lyric Mahler’s life and work are compellingly captured.

 

Aria offers many poems in which the words achieve the condition of music, to quote Pater. Reading a Holland-Batt poem, one is compelled to listen to the resonance, the silence, the meaning that echoes at the end of the last line. There are a few poems of strained epiphanies, and a few others where the eye for imagery goes uncontrolled, and but overall it is a collection to keep, one to re-read for its luminous detail and knowledge, and its tender, compassionate imagination that is always “Letting the ordinary become the last.”

 

 

Ouyang Yu: To Be(long) or Not to Be(long): Issues Of Belonging In A Post-multicultural Australia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Belonging is longing, a longing. For migrants to live in a land they have chosen to settle themselves in, to be(long) or not to be(long) is a crucial question. It depends on what they long for: Is it a temporary abode for short-term benefits before packing up and going home, a permanent enclave on its own or a (second) home where they feel they truly belong or want to be long in? This paper seeks to examine issues of belonging for first and second generation mainland Chinese migrants in a post-malticultural Australia where the idea of multiculturalism is being rendered increasingly obsolete, becoming almost ‘mal’ as in the sense of malfunctioning.[1] The discussion will be based on three books, Wang Hong’s novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), Shen Zhimin’s novel, donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) and Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan)’s photographic novel, he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You).

 

‘I should never have come to Australia, I should never have left my country’[2]

Wang Hong, born in Shanghai in 1962, is a Chinese woman novelist who stayed and studied in Australia from 1990 to 1992 before her return to China in 1993.[3] Apart from this, there is little biographical information on the dust jacket except a curious little note at the end of her Chinese novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), published in September 2002. The note goes, in my translation, ‘Sixth draft 2000/12/8’.[4] One can work out from this that it must have taken her seven years and six drafts to finish writing the novel; further, it must have taken her about two years to find a publisher and get the novel published, nine years after her return to China. It wouldn’t be a far-fetched conjecture that the novel bears some parallel to her own life in that the main protagonist, Ma Lan,[5] returns to China after her failed attempt to stay in Australia through a fake arranged marriage, first with an Italian, then with another man of unidentified nationality by the name of Ma Er Fu (Marf?). True to the synopsis on the back cover of the book, the novel has a ‘wonderful sense of poetry’[6] and, in my view, presents a haunting image of Chinese student lives as if caught in a time warp, a vacuum created as much by their own blind, obstinate attempts to stay as by Australia’s indifference towards their fate, and worse, by Australia’s philistine acts to make a buck by fraud through the performance of characters like Ao Lie Fo (Oliver) and his family.

 

jile yingwu is a painful novel to read. It traces Ma Lan’s short sojourn in Australia as grape-picker, orange-picker, lemon-picker, cleaner and hospice-carer, in places ranging from Red Cliffs on the South-Australia and Victoria border to Westfield in Sydney. In China, this university graduate ‘tried her best to learn English…in order to chuguo [out the country, meaning going overseas] one day.’ (23)[7] After she finishes her studies in Australia, she has to extend her visa but lacks the money to do it. In order to stay, she borrows money to pay Oliver to secure her a partner in a fake marriage. When this does not work, she enters into an arranged marriage with Ma Er Fu in an attempt to stay but decides to leave for China after she aborts her baby. The day she leaves, Ma Er Fu says to her:

 

You are right. Why must you live in this country in the southern hemisphere? There’s no reason why. I can’t see any reason. I understand you. Like you, I also suffer from homesickness….I have left my home far too long. I feel that my inner heart has lost this strength. Living is a habit. The past has been severed and so it is impossible now. I am not living. I am only surviving and hoping that one day I may live better. If I were you, I would perhaps do the same. As long as you believe that huiguo [return country or returning to your home country] makes you happy, you should huiguo.’[8]

 

In the extreme circumstances in which she finds herself, deep in debt from both her own family in China and the Oliver family, Ma Lan has to scrape a living by doing the hard labor as a fruit picker, getting paid 0.39 cents for 10 kilos of grapes picked (6). When she marries Ma Er Fu she has only ten dollars in her account (98). She has to rely on superstitious belief for solace. For example, when Oliver’s mother dies and is about to be shipped back to her gutu [native earth or native land], Ma Lan thinks aloud to herself:

 

            One person leaves Australia.

            One person enters Australia.

            The matter of the world is indestructible. This person who enters should be her! (14)

 

She also willfully persists in her other superstitious belief that she is somehow from the Jewish stock that is ‘distinctly different from hanren [Han people or Chinese people]’ (20) and that it is because of her ‘unresearcheable ancestry-Jewish or tujue [Turkish] merchants’ that she has ‘come ten thousand li at the end of the century to the southern hemisphere to tie the knot of marriage with someone originally from there’ (187), that someone being Ma Er Fu.

 

All Ma Lan ever manages to do in Australia, though, is, as she says, ‘living abjectly-for a green card’ (175), a life that is ‘finished, dead’, and she feels that if she does not sum it all up, ‘what shall arrive is only an extension of death’ (176). Here, one can’t but recall Ouyang Yu’s contemplation that ‘living in australia is living after death’.[9]

 

Other Chinese students fare hardly better than Ma Lan: Yang Fan does not speak English, thus rendered deaf and dumb ever since his coming to Australia (94); Lao Yan writes a letter containing his first-time payment of 100 Australian dollars that will never reach his wife in China (27), which act repeats itself to a painful degree; and Qin Yue foolishly persists in her fantasy that only by studying hard could she somehow hope to change her fate (71). Their names are ultimate symbols of irony and terror, Yang Fan meaning ‘setting sail’ and, as part of the phrase, yangfan yuanhang, implying he’s someone setting sail for a distant voyage with great hopes; Lao Yan hinting at Old Devil; and Qin Yue, Qin Moon, a woman from one of the oldest stocks of the Chinese civilization, right back to the Qin Dynasty (BC 221-207). The place names are also imbued with a sense of the macabre as the Murray River is transliterated as mai lei he (Wheat Tears River) or deliberately mis-spelt in an English poem written by Ma Lan as ‘Marry River’ (85).

 

Added to this is a host of other characters, most of them immigrants whose nationalities remain undisclosed, including the fraudulent Oliver family who lose two members in 10 days, giving false hope to Ma Lan and Qin Yue; Ma Er Fu whose Jewish or Turkish stock is vaguely alluded to and who wonders if he should ever have come to Australia (284); and Steven, an Australian-born Hungarian who plays the role of a Chinese in a play in which no Chinese are allowed (225), the only one who does not have a guishu gan [a sense of belonging] when he goes back to Hungary. He says, ‘when I look at them [Hungarians], I am looking at completely foreign people. Secretly, I even think people there look ugly’ (225). The interesting thing here is that Ma Lan does not identify with Steven. She ‘looks at him, without curiosity, without polite concern’ and ‘her silence bears out that his appeal is rather affected’ (225).

 

Throughout, there is not a single mention of words like racism or multiculturalism. Only in one scene, Liz, an Australian patient, is heard to speak sharply to Ma Lan and Xiao, a Pacific Islander. ‘ “You, you Asians get out!” The old lady tells them ferociously. “Get out of our country!” ’ (275). What follows is a quite unusual musing about happiness by Ma Lan when Liz’s son in a ‘fine’ suit asks her where she learnt her ‘good’ English:

 

Ma Lan’s voice sounds flat. She goes out of the room. She is weary of the way others look [at her]. Nothing will change because of the conversation. He wears a fine suit and thinks he can take pity on her because she speaks English with an English accent. She is a civilized person from an ancient, savage land. She has given all her life to learn English. However, here it is the air everyone breathes. If she had learnt something else, if she were a senior staff member in a transnational company, would her life be worth more? When she worked in a big company in guonei [inside country, meaning China] and also wore a fine suit, she didn’t feel superior to people, she didn’t feel happy.

Happiness is so rare it can only come from the inner heart (276).

 

Where does Ma Lan belong in Australia? One can only gauge by where she situates herself in relation to Australia. In Sydney, ‘she feels like walking on the edge of this city, this city on the edge of the ocean, the continent that this city belongs to being surrounded by the blue sea water, turning around the edge of the planet in which they were born’ (258). Australia means nothing to her. At best, it is a place for her to be ‘walking through’, ‘without leaving a trace (278)’.

 

Interestingly, in an unlikely place, Rose, Tom’s mother in Tony Ayres feature film, Home Song Stories (2007), has said the same thing as expressed by Ma Lan that she ‘should never have come to Australia’.[10]

 

san yuan se[11]: the three original colors

When Shen Jiawei, normally known as Jiawei Shen, the Australian-Chinese artist, did a portrait for John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne, he combined three major elements in the painting: John So’s Chinese face and his Aboriginal attire dealt in oils,[12] an artistic style that originated in the West, read white. Interestingly, more than a decade ago, prior to this portrait executed, in the early 1990s, when The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller was published, there is description of a harmonious relationship between Chinese, Irish and Aboriginal people, as exemplified by Noonan, Feng and Dorset, which was actually based on a goldfield painting by Joseph Johnson, featuring a Chinese, an Irishman and an Aboriginal person playing euchre that was supposedly a reflection of early harmony existing among these very different peoples before racism set in and wrought a havoc that has cast a long shadow over Australia.[13] It may sound exclusive towards people of other nationalities and ethnicities but this concern with the three original colours has been an age-old one with people from as diverse backgrounds as Scottish (Hume Nisbet), Hungarian (David Martin) and white Australian (Xavier Herbert), to whom Chinese play a linking role between the black and the white.[14] In donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) by Shen Zhimin, the combination of the three original colours forms the basis of the novel, in which an Aboriginal boy, a Chinese boy and a white Australian boy go hand in hand in search of Australia’s Aboriginal origin, symbolized by the shangxin zhi di (heart-broken place or heart-breaking place) where a massacre had taken place 200 years ago involving many Aboriginal deaths (227), and, in the process, discover themselves. It is a much happier novel than the ironically titled, Extremely Happy Parrots, in that the three boys choose to live an outcast’s life by roaming the country, casting their sense of belonging to the four winds.

 

The stories of these three boys roaming the country in search of treasure, spiritual and otherwise, are less important than the idea that lies behind the construction of the novel. This idea reflects a significant realization, albeit limited, on the part of the author that the key to racial and cultural harmony in Australia is a blending of the three primary colours and it is based on this realization that Shen assigns roles for the three boys to play. What is more intriguing is the fact that two of the boys come from disreputable family backgrounds, tang mu si (Thomas), illegitimate son of a conservative MP who commits suicide after his affair is exposed and Gao Qiang [meaning High Strong], son of a corrupt Chinese company director. When these family tragedies occur, Thomas and Gao Qiang become homeless, straying into Redfern where they befriend tu gu [meaning Earth Valley], the Aboriginal boy, and fight together against the police in the Redfern Riots.[15] It is obvious that an echo to Australia’s convict past is implied in the family background of Thomas and Gao Qiang in that both have come from a disgraced family background and a defiance of Australian police, symbol of state control and power, is shown through their fight in the riots. Despite rather stereotypical portraits of the three boys, e.g., Tu Gu as someone who does not care about money (89) and who identifies strongly with the wandering spirit of an eternal traveler ge lan te (Grant) (125), Gao Qiang as someone overwhelmingly concerned with money (89, 129) and Thomas as someone ‘the most brainy’, full of intelligent ideas (135), the novel nevertheless reveals a darker truth about Australia as a place not fit for Chinese to stay. After all their adventures involving fights against a rascal si di mu (Steam), their musical band going places and their search for gold, etc, Gao Qiang ‘is going back to China’ (318). The novel ends with Gao Qiang saying, in response to the questions from Tu Gu and Thomas as to why he is going back, ‘You forgot. Didn’t I say that I was going to run a trading company and come to Australia to do business? When I make money and make a fortune, I shall invite you to have fun in China.’ (318)

 

It is worth noting that, by comparison with Wang Hong, Shen’s message is upbeat about his three fictional boys, as reflected in a remark made by Grant, an erstwhile bank manager who gives up on his work in favour of traveling alone, having been traveling on the road for 25 years, without family or kids. He says that after he gets on the road, he ‘thinks of wanting to go home less and less’ (125), that it’s only on the road that he ‘feels whole’ (127) and that, for him, ‘there is always a home by the side of roads’ (128). What I can recall from this is the story James Chang (Zhang Zhizhang), a Taiwanese-Chinese writer, told in the 1994 Chinese-Australian Arts Festival of an old overseas Chinese who said that the minute he sat down in his seat on a plane he felt at home and that’s where he belonged.

 

There is an early echo to Dynamic Treasure Trove in Shen Zhimin’s novella, titled, bian se hu (The Colour Changing Lake), which I published in Otherland (No. 2, 1996) as editor. In that story about the difficulties Chinese students have when they first arrive in Australia, it is Aborigines who befriend them, not white Australians. In fact, white Australians are terrible racists. When Jiang Hua, the name meaning River Flower or River Chinese, the protagonist, is playing erhu in a small town, a ‘tall white woman’ rushes in and tells him off, ‘like yelling at an animal’;[16] she calls Jiang ‘a beggar from the East and a heathen’.[17] Jiang has to leave even though he thinks that ‘their behaviour does not correspond to God’s spirit.’[18] When Jiang Hua is detained by the Immigration officers, it is niao (Bird), an Aboriginal elder who comes to his aid with his men and gives the officers and policemen a talking-to, ‘We have been living here for hundreds of years thousands of years tens of thousands of years. We are really master of this land. We should decide who is or is not an illegal immigrant. This Chinese is my friend. He can stay as long as he likes. It’s got nothing to do with you. If you don’t like it, you can go back to Sydney or elsewhere. Or you can go back to your old home in Europe.’[19]

 

In Shen Zhimin’s novella, there is almost a visible determination not to give whites their due but to insist on a healthy dose of ethnic mixture. None of his heroes or heroines are white Australians. Born of an English dandy father and a Gipsy mother, Weiduoliya (Victoria) is a street artist who becomes Jiang’s friend. Bird, the Aboriginal elder, is of Aboriginal and Chinese parentage because his grandfather was a Chinese gold-digger who escaped from ‘white persecution’ to live with Aborigines and married an Aboriginal woman, Bird’s grand-mother.[20] Even the two Immigration officers bent on taking Jiang prisoner turn out to be migrants themselves, one a Jew from England whose father had escaped there from Poland in the Second World War and the other is originally also an illegal immigrant from Yugoslavia.[21] It is these ideological underpinnings that made Shen’s novel and novella read more like political fables than truly realized fiction.

 

Possibly related to Australia[22]

he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You) is not an Australian novel; it is written by a hyphenated Australian. Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan) has indeed lived for many years in Australia since 1990 but, after he became an Australian citizen, he decided to return to Shanghai in or about 2000, coming back once every year, according to him, to lodge his annual tax return. In this roaming novel, interspersed with photographs, from Madrid through Saville, Bacelona, Napoli, Sicily, Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva, Paris, Avignon and London, enacted entirely between ni (you) and wo (I), through a series of email letters or interior monologues, Australia is virtuely non-existent. The only Australian is a girl by the name of da fu ni (Daphne) that ‘I’ met in a Shanghai-based art exhibition (61), who grew up in a Melbourne beach town and is a girl of ‘innocent and natural Australian qualities’ (66). When they meet in Barcelona, Daphne asks ‘I’, ‘You go out alone this far. Do you want to escape? How far do you want to go?’ (66). ‘I’, who does not have a name, says in a philosophical remark that sounds like Grant in donggan baozang, ‘Travel seems to give me more opportunities to catch things that almost drift past my body’ (67).

 

A novel of lacuna in which Australia does not exist, by a Chinese-Australian who now prefers to make his home in Shanghai, ‘the most Westernised city in China’ (19), is perhaps more telling than otherwise, more Australian than un-Australian, or should I say, more Australian in being un-Australian. What is not expressed in the fiction finds expression in the non-fiction, in the houji (Postscript), in which Zhao Chuan describes why he wrote the book. ‘The reason why I had that desire to write is probably related to my having lived for many years in Australia. It is a migrant society where people from different cities and different cultural experiences have to live together. We are curious about each other; our mutual interaction is ongoing but is never somehow fitting. We live closely together: working in the same place, separated by buildings or walls or we scrape our shoulders as we walk past or are even sleeping in the same bed. However, our memories are probably far apart, hard to be pulled together (230).’

 

More than Leslie Zhao’s novel, Hongchen jie (Doomed to Red Dust), a recent novel by Ying Ge, based in Australia since 1989, completely abandons Australia in its narration, featuring instead a Chinese-American in Lin Wenlu, who gives up his well-paying job in an American company and chooses to stay in Beijing.[23] It is not hard to find that this homeward bound attachment has already been foreshadowed in his first novel, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean), in which an old Chinese man muses on the significance of overseas Chinese in these words:

 

Wherever I go, I remain a Chinese in other people’s eyes. Chinese are a heavy nation. (339-340)…But, I think, whatever circumstances in which they find themselves, Chinese people have a thought that co-exists with their hearts. That is: I am born on yellow earth, I am a Chinese, I should do something for my zuguo (ancestral nation or motherland) and I should do something for my nation….(341)[24]

 

This is of course didactic but didactic in a way that makes sense. If multiculturalism is meant to keep peoples apart, so that ‘one cannot possibly dance the Russian ballet to the accompaniment of Aboriginal instruments nor can Western ways of singing match Asian folk tunes’,[25] they cannot but keep harking back to their zuguo (ancestral nation) as their only way out, as Ying Ge says on the back of his first novel, ‘However far they go, they remain sons and grandsons of Yellow Emperor, born on Yellow Earth.’[26]

 

If there is any home to belong to, it is perhaps in the fiction that Zhao Chuan creates, one that is ‘ready to get lost, to encounter strange crowds and to turn into another direction after an exchange of a few words’. (231)

 

The most poignant remark is made in a recent editorial in huaxia zhoubao (The Weekly Chinese) newspaper, in Melbourne, in celebration of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (25/9/07) when the editor says, after describing Australia as a ‘migrant country’ full of peoples from all over the world, ‘You’d be dead wrong if you think this country is like China where there are “fifty six nationalities, fifty six constellations, fifty six flowers and fifty six brothers and sisters that all belong in one family”. Respecting each other like guests is all superficiality, formality, politeness, distance, strangeness and non-intimacy; it is hard to mix like oil and water.”[27]




[1] Ying Ge, in his novel, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean) remarks that, by comparison with the USA, Canada, Japan and ‘some advanced nations in Europe’, ‘Australia has not found concrete ways of how to promote multiculturalism and so has no culture at the moment’. See Ying Ge, whose real name is Liu Yingge, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean). Beijing: Authors’ Press, 1997, p. 255. [English translation mine and elsewhere unless otherwise stated]

[2] Wang Hong, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots). Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 2002, p. 284.

[3] Ibid, front flap information, with her photo.

[4] Ibid, p. 288.

[5] Her name directly translates as Horse Blue that faintly recalls German painter Franz Marc’s painting, Blue Horse, in 1911. See it at: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/marc/blue_horse.jpg.html

[6] Ibid, back cover.

[7] Please note that the Chinese pinyin and the translation and explanation in the square brackets are all mine.

[8] Ibid, p. 281.

[9] Ouyang Yu, ‘After Death, After Orgasm’, Moon over Melbourne and Other Poems. London: Shearsman Books, 2005, pp. 46-7. Death is central to Ying Ge’s novel, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean). Beijing: Writers’ Press, 1997, in which many Chinese students die: a Shanghai girl is killed by an Australian suffering from mental illness (69 and 73) and Jiang Xiaofan, another Chinese student, dies of work-related fatigue and cancer (235), one of many similar deaths in Australia.

[10] From memory, the subtitle renders it as ‘I should never have come here’ whereas what Rose says in Mandarin is wo zhen bu gai dao aozhou lai (I really should not have come to Australia). I saw this film sometime in mid-August 2007 in Dendy’s Cinema, Canberra. Similarly, in Ying Ge’s novel, ibid, p. 69, Cheng Xiaoyi, a Chinese girl student keeps saying, ‘wo bu gai lai aozhou, wo bu gai lai aozhou’ (I should not have come to Australia, I should not have come to Australia) when she witnesses a fellow Chinese girl student stabbed to death by an Australian man suffering from mental illness.

[11] Literally, three original colors, equivalent to the English ‘primary colors’ of red, yellow and blue, but here they refer to the black, yellow and white colors.

[12] According to a reviewer, it’s a possum cloak given John So as a gift by an Aboriginal elder. See John MacDonald, ‘Portrait of the Prize’ (30/4/2005) at: http://www.smh.com.au/news/Arts/Portrait-of-the-prize/2005/04/29/1114635739247.html

[13] The painting in question is titled, ‘Euchre in the Bush’, by Joseph Johnson (1848-1904), which, according to Alex Miller, had been totally neglected when he first found it, a sign of Chinese ethnicity left uncelebrated for a long time.

[14] In Nisbet’s works set in New Zealand, idealized Chinese, such as Wung-Ti, are paired with Maoris. In Martin’s Hero of Too, for example, Lam Yut Soon, a social outcast, shares accommodation with part-Aboriginal Snowy Barker and in Herbert’s Capricornia, Ket, part-Chinese, part-Aboriginal, is no match for Norman Shillingsworth, part-white, part-Aboriginal. See discussion of these authors in Representing the Other: Chinese in Australian Fiction: 1888-1988, unpublished PhD thesis by Ouyang Yu. Also, the Rush Hour film series is another quintessential example of this Yellow-Black pairing, as typified in Rush Hour 3 that I saw last night (29/9/07).

[15] See Chapter, hongfangqu baoluan [Redfern District Riots, pp. 18-36]).

[16] Shen Zhimin, bian se hua (The Colour Changing Lake), Otherland (No. 2, 1996), p. 42.

[17] Ibid, p. 42.

[18] Ibid, p. 43.

[19] Ibid, p. 46.

[20] Ibid, p. 43.

[21] Ibid, p. 50.

[22] Based on a remark made by Zhao Chuan in his after-word to he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You), Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2006, which goes, in my translation, ‘The reason why I had the desire to write [the novel] is possibly related to my having lived for many years in Australia’, p. 230.

[23] Ying Ge, Hongchen jie (Doomed to Red Dust). Huhhot: Yuanfang Publishing House, China, 2001.

[24] Ying Ge, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean). Beijing: Authors’ Press, 1997.

[25] Ibid, p. 255.

[26] Ibid, back-cover blurb.

[27] Yang Yu, ‘yiguo de zhongqiujie’ (Mid-autumn festival in an alien country), huaxia zhoubao (The Weekly Chinese), 21/9/07, p. 1.