December 25, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Elleke Boehmer was born in Durban and lives in Oxford. She is the author of five novels including Screens against the Sky (1990), Bloodlines (2000), Nile Baby (2008), and The Shouting in the Dark (2015). Screens against the Sky was short-listed for the David Higham Prize, and Bloodlines for the Sanlam Prize. The Shouting in the Dark was long-listed for the Sunday Times prize (South Africa). She is the author and editor of over fifteen other books, including Stories of Women (2005), Postcolonial Poetics (2018), and a widely translated biography of Nelson Mandela (2008). Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015) was the winner of the biennial ESSE 2015-16 Prize. South, North is her second collection of short stories, following Sharmilla, and other Portraits (2010). The Australian edition of The Shouting in the Dark, together with other writing about the global south, is coming out from UWAP in early 2019.
Evelina
17:30
Evelina liked to hang around airports though, till today, she had never yet left an airport on an aeroplane. She liked to sit in the arrivals halls, in the coffee place close to the exit where families waited with balloons and smiles. She liked to absorb the ambiente, she preferred the Spanish word. She was absorbing it now, though in departures not arrivals, the café alongside the security gates, drinking her coffee and smiling as she watched the families smiling. It made her happy, that she could be included in their ambiente though she wasn’t required to say a word.
Her airport hobby had started a few years ago, three or four, she couldn’t remember exactly, back in the old century, the day she said goodbye to her best friend Marta. After her marriage went bad Marta had decided to make a clean break. Evelina and Marta had sat here in the same café, Marta retouching her lipstick, peering with narrowed eyes into the clip-open lipstick case she always kept in her bag.
Evelina had watched Marta walk that day through the departure gates sobbing into a tissue but with a kind of skip of her left heel, a definite spring in her step. Watching Marta’s departing back Evelina couldn’t help noticing the spring.
These days Marta was teaching languages in Spain, near Toledo. She was earning good money and seeing someone, she wrote, a nice teacher at the secondary school. Although she worried sometimes that he was so much shorter than herself. What their future children might think.
Their other friend, Teresa, mouthy Teresa, took the same exit route a year or so later. Again Evelina came to say goodbye. Again she bought a round of hot chocolate here in the café, and again stood with her face pressed to the security glass, watching Teresa sink down the long escalator to the departure gates, Teresa waving and smiling and then as she stepped off the escalator quite briskly tucking her tissues away in the side pouch of her bag.
Teresa had aimed to join Marta in the language school in Spain but then she had got talking to people, and people had talked nicely about her, so now she was working on cruise ships in the Caribbean. Everything had changed for her and was raised up to a new level, and now, Teresa wrote in her last birthday card, it should be Evelina’s turn. Now Evelina had her chance to go away like the others. She should grab the opportunity in both hands.
By the time Teresa left, Evelina was already in the habit of coming to the airport. She came perhaps once a month, especially on quiet weekdays, in the evening, sometimes still in her tour-guide uniform. The only person who knew about her habit was Jorge himself. She liked coming even without anyone to wave off, perhaps more so. She liked having time to watch the families, the kids in their Brazil-made chanclas running and chasing each other around the chairs and tables like these two little girls about six or seven here at the table besides hers. Round the table they chased, now one way, now the other, the smaller one giggling helplessly. She liked it so much she sometimes skipped going over to stand in the departure area, though she liked it there, too, watching the travellers being hugged.
But her best bit, secretly, was her own private regreso, coming back into the city after her airport coffee. This she liked the most. Sitting at the airport and then coming home again. She liked swooping her car into the fast lane, nearly empty at this hour, and then up the steep ramp and down her own avenida. She liked that feeling of coming back into her tiny flat, up the three flights of concrete steps that the janitor washed at five every evening, and opening the door onto her two neat rooms with everything standing exactly where she had left it. Even if that was just a few hours ago and no one could possibly have been in.
How grateful this journey made her for everything that she had here in this city. Which is why she didn’t get enough of visiting the airport, that heady feeling that the trip back home gave her every time.
Her family didn’t know about this habit of enjoying the arrivals hall or they might have come along on this mild Saturday evening, to help her get away, to give her the push she needed.
Her parents lived up country now, in the campo. They had held their send-off last weekend in her flat—her parents, her older brother Enrico who was a small pets vet, a couple of cousins from her mother’s side. They had made the four-hour round trip together in Enrico’s car. They had served oozing facturas from the panadería downstairs, and black tea with lemon, plus stronger stuff for those who wanted it, and they had talked about the repairs to Enrico’s new house and when he might start converting his extra garage into a practice. One of the cousins would be coming to stay for a while in Evelina’s flat, to have a long-expected holiday in the city, they said. They had talked only about solid things. As if by not saying much about Evelina’s leaving or about Jorge, the reason for her leaving, they could all pretend it wasn’t really taking place.
On the washed concrete steps they had said goodbye and their hugs were dry and unfussy. They were immigrant people, a little Welsh, a little Irish, and a lot of Buenos Aires. They set their faces to the future, which is to say, the future that was here, now, and solid.
From the beginning Evelina’s father had refused to say Jorge’s name. He had refused at first to meet him and when he did he refused at first to shake his hand. But he had never paid any of her few boyfriends even a morsel of attention.
‘His eyes want to undress you,’ he said of the first, Luciano, all of seventeen, still at school at the time. ‘It’s disgusting, arrojalo, get rid of him.’
Evelina had, but none of the others she brought home later had fared any better. Papá said he wanted to hit them all. In another day and age, he swore, he’d have taken a sword to them, pure and simple.
So this afternoon it was Evelina’s turn to sit in the airport waiting for a plane, on her own, without her family, but this time with a ticket in her purse. It was her turn to begin a new phase, in North America, in New York, a new phase to go with the new century, a chance to explore a new life with Jorge her fiancé, her energetic, open-hearted Jorge who had gone on ahead to set things up.
Sitting in the departures coffee shop, smaller than the one downstairs, Evelina noticed for the first time the good view through the big window beside the check-in gates. Even from here she could see through the window a section of the runway and the lit-up planes criss-crossing like fireflies against the sky now darkening towards evening.
Next time she’s here, she told herself, she’ll go over to the window to take a longer look. There was a shiny rail to lean on. There were people right now leaning on it, looking out, pointing, their dark profiles stamped on the glass. But then she remembered there wouldn’t be a next time and she had to put down her coffee, her hands trembled so.
The bag of toiletries and warm clothes she had packed stood beside her. She kept her leg pressed against the bag and her handbag pressed between her feet. Their box crates had gone ahead. For the air-trip itself she hadn’t known what to pack. What do you pack when you are changing continents, setting out to make a new life in New York with your beloved, your prometido? You could pack everything, or you could pack only your most special things that you wouldn’t want to send in a crate.
When her alarm rang this morning, she couldn’t find anything special enough to take along, nothing anyway that was small enough to carry, so she packed just this compact bag and in the end put in the wind-up alarm clock itself, on top, wrapped in a hanky. Couldn’t do harm, to start a new life with a reliable alarm clock.
As for the box crates, filling them had been like filling bags for charity, piling in stuff you never expected to see again. Even now, a few weeks on, she could barely remember the contents, Jorge’s kitchenware, yes, with the special block of knives, a needlepoint picture of snowy mountains done by his late mother as a young woman, also a few old pieces of furniture, hand-me-down stuff dry and cracked from standing long years in the sunshine in relatives’ apartments.
Old stuff for a new country—to her it didn’t make sense but Jorge insisted. It would cost the earth, he said, beginning a new home in New York from scratch.
Evelina wished Jorge was here now to give the encouragement his bright face always sparked in her, not that she ever let on. She didn’t want to raise second thoughts in his mind. She didn’t want him to know how scared she could get. With his big voice, his big muscles, his strong stride—nothing gave him a way of understanding this tremble now in her hands.
Perhaps it wasn’t wise for him to have gone ahead, she thought, though she had pressed him to go, so that he’d believe in her. It wasn’t wise, too, that she hadn’t yet let out her flat, her little home in the big city with its panadería downstairs and the outdoors gym painted in rainbow colours across the street. Would she, would they, be able to find anything so well-set-up in New York?
Right now Jorge was staying in some cheap hotel trying to find them a new home. They’d talked through every detail. He’d said he’d get in touch as soon as something worked out but he hadn’t yet called. She wished he’d called. She told herself he was waiting for her—waiting for this plane out there now on the runway, waiting for her to arrive in it, to come to New York to be with him and make a new home. She knew he would tell her everything then.
Home! Evelina looked around at the familiar purple sky beyond the window, and, closer at hand, the children in their flip-flop chanclas, two small boys this time kicking an empty drink carton back and forth, the little girls had disappeared. She looked at the shiny stickers of saints on the menu board over the coffee machine, and the two old men in crisp polo shirts talking at the exit, gesticulating just the same as they would meeting in a park in town.
Already these things were starting to look flat, two-dimensional and flat, as though they were already receding from view. Soon, within an hour or so, they would be pushed into the far distance by the whoosh of the aircraft, and then, tomorrow, by Jorge and his dreams, Jorge whom she really liked and thought she could soon, very soon, begin to love.
Jorge, she thought, and saw him sitting again in front of her with his hair tumbling over his forehead just as he had sat right there across the table at this exact coffee place those weeks ago at this exact time, give or take, the two icy red aperitivos standing untouched between them. He had bought them como una celebración, he said, to mark the start of their big adventure together.
Jorge’s pale eyes in his bronze face searching hers for some sign of reassurance, she could feel the pull in them, and she had told herself silently sitting there with her hand in his that she would see him again soon, in only a couple of months, seven or so weeks, though it felt a lot longer. And she had wished, still silently, it didn’t feel so long.
‘The planes for North America always leave around now, in the evening,’ he had told her, following her eyes watching the departure boards. ‘So that when you arrive es un nuevo día, the start of a new day.’
He had been making conversation, she could tell, thinking she knew these facts, but she hadn’t really known these things. She knew nothing. She worked in tourism but she had never yet left the country, not in her whole life, not once.
All she did know was that every day around nightfall, wherever she was, she felt a pull to go home so strong it upset her to resist it. She had felt the pull then waiting in this café with him. She felt it now.
But how could she have told him this? It would have sounded like doubt. It would have given him second thoughts. Yet all she wanted right now, today, even on this day of her departure, was to be in her flat and draw the curtains and scrunch up in a corner of her armchair with a cup of something warm. She thought of her armchair, the red one her mother had given her, the armchair that right now, unbelievably, was making its way across the sea squeezed in a crate alongside Jorge’s stuff.
‘Now promise me,’ he had urged that evening, his forehead shining like a lamp. ‘When the day arrives, just lock up the flat, and come. We’ve sent everything ahead that we need. I’ll be at the other end, remember, waiting for you. I’ll take you back to our apartamento, the one I’ll have got for us. We will start our new life. We’ll marry as soon as. I’ll begin straightaway to get our paperwork in order.’
And Evelina had waved him off, watching him descend down the long escalator, blowing kisses, till all she could see was his waving hand, and then, nothing. She had stood a while longer, in case he popped back into view. It was like him to step back, to give one last kiss, one last wave. But he hadn’t. So, when she was sure he was gone, she had slipped down to the café in arrivals and ordered herself a coffee. Her mouth had been dry from something she couldn’t place, though she knew it wasn’t sadness.
Evelina now bought a second coffee, a takeaway, and wondered about going downstairs for a while, to the arrivals hall. It was still ages before the flight. But then she sat down once more at the same table in the seating area, and pushed her used cup and saucer over to the edge, to make room. She sipped her coffee and looked around at all the familiar things, the stickers of the saints, the stainless steel bar, the children in their chanclas kicking and running. No one seemed to notice she hadn’t paid the drink-in extra. No one bothered about her sitting here at all.
20:30
Evelina checked her watch and tucked her chin deeper into her cretonne scarf. The sky beyond the viewing window was dark now and the evening cool settling in, even here in this air-conditioned space, but there was still plenty of time. Coming to the airport so early she had left plenty of time. She had shifted now from the departures coffee shop to a row of angled chairs alongside it. There was more than enough time still to go through security and buy a bottle of water and an eye-mask at the other end, as Jorge had instructed.
‘On the plane you make your own refugio, your own night capsule,’ he had said. ‘You tuck up in your seat and pull your blanket tight and close your eyes, and then, before you know it, you’ve arrived, you’re there.’
‘I know you,’ he’d also said, just before he left, swallowing his aperitivo in one gulp and glaring in that unblinking way he had when he was concentrating. ‘Don’t sit around and think or you’ll never be able to get away. Take your bag and walk straight through to the gates.’
Pressing her legs together and pulling her coat hem to her knees—her coat against the New York winter—Evelina tried now to bring his face into the very centre of her memory, to hold his image there so she could believe again in everything he had told her, in her new life in New York together with her handsome, savvy fiancé, believe in the restaurant business he would set up there, in a city full of restaurants.
But though he had sat across that table only a month or so ago the main thing she remembered was the pale eyes burning in his tanned face, that and what he said about the nuevo día.
When she arrives it will be the start of a new day.
Easier was detail from further back, the funny way his curly hair blew across his forehead when they went out cycling on Sundays, and their picnics in parks all over the city, and the food he liked to prepare, the curried eggs and spicy beef salads that were his speciality, the plastic dishes of food spread out along with his metal mate pot on her printed cloth on the grass.
She remembered their first date, at a rival steak restaurant to his, away from the centre, and the lovely loose feeling in her limbs that his energetic talk gave her, the pictures he painted of hiking in Patagonia, and seeing a mountain leopard, and then his dream of setting up a steak restaurant on 5th Avenue. These details felt like just days ago.
Clearest was the very first time of course, that startling and magical day when they had first met. There he had stood at the city event for young entrepreneurs, talking and making gestures with his big arms. She had worked through the exhibition hall looking for him, trawling up and down the aisles, and found him at last standing beside a poster that showed a steak jugoso in gleaming close-up, handing out leaflets, his fine wide face shining like a bronze mask.
Earlier, she had been at her post at the exhibition hall entrance just beyond the sliding doors and he had passed her. She was in her brown and orange tourist-board uniform checking nametags and handing out convention maps. She had given him a map and he had been the only one to say gracias, politely, looking her in the eye.
She found his stall by remembering the number on his tag. For her whole break she stood and looked at him from beside a pillar. She had never seen anyone with so open a face, so confident and shining a look, the kind of face you’d travel halfway across the world to see again.
On his way out he caught her eye for a second time and she smiled.
‘I saw your talk,’ she said.
He wrote her number on the company card she gave him and called the very next morning, just before nine.
Their first date was that Friday and they had got to know each other quickly after that. He had taken her to film festivals all over the city to see the old Argentinian films, BA a la vista, Rápido, La casa del ángel. She liked the dusty smells of the art house cinemas. She had only ever gone to big movie theatres before, with Enrico and his friends.
When Jorge proposed he had taken her back to the exhibition hall entrance, to the exact spot where she had stood and given him her number. It was a windy day and old leaflets and other rubbish bowled about their feet.
Later, he said he’d invited a saxophonist friend to come and play them background music from Rápido there on the steps but the guy hadn’t shown up. Who knows why? Jorge shrugged. Perhaps he hadn’t given him enough money for the cab.
But it hadn’t bothered her. She had her ring, she had his declaración. She assured him she preferred a proposal involving just the two people themselves.
Her father was more scornful and probably she shouldn’t have told him. It wasn’t his business. And yet she had blurted it out, there at her send-off party, the dulce de leche squeezing out of the pastry in his hand. And straightaway of course he harrumphed something about young men who thought too much about their grooming and too little about their bank balance. Which was unfair, she knew.
But she’d kept quiet, she’d said nothing in Jorge’s defence. She’d merely turned her eyes away from Papá eating his oozing factura and remembered the Chinese burns he used to give her and Enrico as children, when they were naughty.
‘See how much you want to stick to your silliness,’ he’d say, wringing their arms like a rag, twisting harder if they squeaked.
‘People go to New York and become anything they want, dancers, directors, professors, even princesses,’ Jorge had said those weeks ago over their untouched aperitivos. ‘It doesn’t matter if you come from los confines de la tierra, New York makes dreams come true.’
‘Sueños,’ he had said, cupping one hand like a scale. ‘Realidad,’ he had added, holding up the other.
She had looked hard then into his pale eyes. She saw in them excitement and hope. She saw the shape of the New York skyline. She would have liked to see something more, a little fear perhaps, so they could talk about that together. But Jorge’s eyes were the eyes of a man who would forge ahead and press on regardless of what setbacks he might meet, who would build his dreams in the streets of New York even if he didn’t have an Evelina to support him.
She jumped up now in a sudden impulse of horror, her coat falling to the ground. Jorge forging on without her, she couldn’t bear to think of it. She must go through with this now, fly away or else! Or these extremities of the earth would swallow her up. Jorge had the power to save her. Jorge would fold her in his arms and make new things possible. He had hope enough for two. Her chance lay in his hands, no, in his hands and her hands. Tomorrow morning she would be with him, pressed to his side, travelling with him on the subway into the heart of New York. But getting there depended on her, on getting herself on that flight. That was it with fretting. She could lose everything this way. Her chance lay here in her hands.
She picked up her bags and saw there was still time, un poco, a bit of time. She checked her watch against the digital clock on the departures board and made her way over to the viewing window. She wanted one last look at the familiar sky, the familiar line of hills still discernible above the distant city, the planes with their illuminated windows ascending and descending. If she put it off now, she would not see it again for years.
21:00
The tannoy announced that the flight gate was open. Evelina turned from the viewing window and saw the clear bubble of the telephone booth on the near wall. She didn’t want to see the booth but once she had seen it she couldn’t forget it. One last thing she really had to do, this is what it was telling her.
Jorge hadn’t called though he’d said he would, so now she would call him. Surprise, surprise, she would make a joke of it, laughing lightly. Sorpresa, little did you think! At the airport, where else? Just to say—this time tomorrow, our nuevo día, we’ll be on our way home, beginning our new life together.
But what if there was no home, no new apartamento? What if their papers had been refused? She’d heard nothing. She put down her bags at the booth and checked the slip in her passport, the numbers he had given her, first his friend in the steakhouse business, and then his father’s colleague’s nephew. He’d be staying with either the one or the other, whoever had space.
‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ he’d said. ‘For a few days I won’t have a phone.’
But he hadn’t called. And it was weeks, not days. She didn’t doubt him but still he hadn’t called. Evelina felt suddenly empty, cavernous. She felt the great dark seas that separated them wash over her heart.
No, she thought, no, and reached suddenly for the back of the chair closest to her, the rough woollen shoulder of the gentleman sitting in it.
Somebody then took her arm and guided her to a nearby counter.
‘You look very pale,’ the attendant at the counter said. ‘Look, why not give me your bags? I can help you to your gate.’
‘Let me take a moment,’ Evelina heard herself say in a composed voice. The cold steel edge of the counter pressing into her palm gave her comfort. It was like holding onto a raft.
‘I was trying to make a call but somehow it didn’t work,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get through. Maybe I don’t have the right number.’
21:30
The last call for her flight, for the second time they were calling out her name, Evelina, Evelina, as if they were welcoming her. She was on her way, she really was. She had worked in the travel business and now she was a traveller, too. She had made it through security and passport control. Her documents were here in her left hand, slid inside her travel company’s own white plastic folder. The folder was her goodbye present from her colleagues, that and a smart purse containing a nail-care kit. Had she remembered to pack the purse? She wanted to check but as she made to bend down she caught sight of the gate number there ahead of her, silver numbers on a blue screen, and a flight attendant waving. There was no one else about, theirs was the last plane out, she was the last passenger to arrive. She was almost at the gate. Now it was just the flight bridge to go and then they’d seal the great aeroplane door behind her. She really was on her way. Tomorrow she’d be with Jorge in New York, riding the subway with him as they somehow had never done here in their own city, pressing herself to his side.
Jorge, she could see his pale eyes burning in his bronze face—his face like a mask sometimes, polished, shining. She tried to imagine him waving at her like the flight attendant was waving, waving across the great dark seas that stretched between here and New York. She made herself see the moving waters as if from high up in the dark sky, from the plane she would soon be flying in, soaring above those black waves she had so recently felt curling around her heart. From here up high, her seatbelt pressing into her lap, she could see, peering down, the stars reflected in the dark waters, and the lights of the city shimmering at their edge, and, though it was still night, the black arrow of the plane’s shadow rushing across the moving, churning sea.
December 18, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jane O’Sullivan (@sightlined) is a writer based in Sydney. Her nonfiction has been published in Vault, Art Collector, Art Guide and Ocula. Her short fiction has appeared in Island and was recently highly commended in the Newcastle Short Story Award.””Cat Money” is Highly Commended in the 2018 Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize.
Cat Money
The toddler was still banging on about cat money. “Look,” he demanded, his singsong vowels stretching the word all out of shape. He was up on his toes, clinging to the seat of the kitchen stool, peering right into the cat’s face. “Looklooklooklook.”
And so she looked, just in time to see a paw shoot out and her boy go stiff. Then was a second of shock and then the wailing started, a great klaxon of need. The sound left no room to think about anything else, though she wasn’t too worried, not at first. The cat had a way of firing warning shots, little taps without her claws. But then she saw the blood. “Oh,” she said, in that useless way, with too much shock and not nearly enough comfort. And again. “Oh, honey.”
Then she, too, managed to break the seal of her shock. She dropped the wooden spoon in the pot and knelt, pulling Chester’s body into her chest. He was still rigid with it, the anger and the hurt and the sting of it, but she was stronger. She pulled him in and murmured in his ear, and finally he gave, falling into her like a hot, wet bundle just pulled from the washing machine. She held him tight while the tears rolled down his face and onto her arms.
Slowly, he coughed it out. “Keely…scratch…me.” She nodded, waiting. She was learning to wait. He couldn’t, so she had to. He wasn’t yet big enough to let it sit, to let it all pool until there was enough of it to gather up into a story. It came out as it bubbled up in him. “Keely…me…mummy,” he wailed. She kissed his hair and let him heave it out. She listened to the broken rhythm of his body, the coughs and sobs and hiccups pushing him out of time. “Deep breaths,” she soothed. “Deep breaths.”
But he couldn’t. Of course, he couldn’t. She could only give him her beat to follow, and so she did, rocking and stroking and breathing slow and deep. And she waited, her mind drifting between the sounds of her son and the glub of the oats on the stove.
The cat had come first. They always do.
When they had first come home from the hospital, Ivan had placed the bassinet down on the living room floor with cautious ceremony: There! Home! Straight away, Keely had padded up to investigate. She sniffed it slowly. It was a rented bassinet, and probably came with the smells of countless other people. She worked her way around it and then something had happened—Chester had snuffled in his sleep, or perhaps thrown an arm up—and the cat had flung herself backwards into the air then fled under the couch.
The recrimination lasted for weeks.
Or at least, it had felt like that, when she was up feeding Chester in the middle of the night—all those long, dark hours piling up—and Keely had come to sit on the arm of the couch to watch with reproachful eyes. “What have I done?” she asked the cat one night, her voice breaking under the weight of her exhaustion. What could Keely know about motherhood? She’d been desexed back at the shelter. She’d never seen a kitten. But even then, she seemed to know the answer well enough.
Slowly, Chester’s crying shifted from impulse to habit. She could hear it as she stroked his hair. It was in the suck, she decided. It was in the ragged pull of each new breath into his body. She could tell. He was finding his rhythm again.
The room took on the sepia smell of scalded milk.
She suspected Chester was enjoying his crying now, and the cuddle. He didn’t want to move. She bit her lip. Did she have the heart for it? She did. She stood up, the great mass of him still held to her chest, and tried to set him on his feet. “Let me have a look,” she said.
She took his hand in hers and gently lifted it from his cheek. His face was blotchy and slick and there, travelling along his cheek were two red lines, the blood already hardening into beads. It wasn’t deep. It would be a lesson, wouldn’t it?
How did other people know where these lines were? There were hundreds of them, every day, every kind you could imagine. Some she stepped over, like cracks in the pavement. Others she walked straight into, their spider-silk sticking to her face and catching in her hair like threads of quiet punishment. Oh, what have I done? Did I do it right?
The cat regarded her from the stool, her paws neatly folded back underneath her body and the fur fluffed out over the sides of her collar—that sign of feline disgruntlement. Keely had no time for such questions. What did cats care about consensus?
She gently prised the boy from her legs, just sniffling now, and went to turn off the stove. Because that was what she’d done, wasn’t it? She’d interrupted everything: the porridge, her sleep, her thoughts. Things that she didn’t realise could be broken now lay in pieces around her, and every day was a scramble to gather what she could. Anything she made of herself was an assembly of small moments. It’s possible she’d never been quite whole, but there had been a bulk to her once, a sense of solidity. Now the only thing that seemed to hold was her love.
Chester hung off her legs as she served up the porridge and poured on the milk. It would be too hot for him. She stirred, and the steam rose. On the other side of the kitchen island, Keely tucked her nose down and closed her eyes. Calm settled.
When they’d first got her, they’d let her come and go as she pleased. They’d leave the balcony door open a few inches so she could go sun herself on the rain-blackened square of concrete outside, or even jump down onto the letterbox below and then to cat freedom. And then, when they had to go to work, they locked it, leaving Keely on whichever side she happened to find herself.
Then their neighbour had been robbed. He’d fronted up in his boxer shorts and grabbed a knife from the kitchen sink. He’d ended up in hospital. The burglar, of course, had never been caught. Now their front door had a proper brick of a deadlock, and the sliding door to the balcony had a sawn-off length of broomstick wedged in its track.
Even then, she’d opened it to let Keely out. It seemed important that Keely go be a cat, to prowl and bury her business and eat Indian Mynas. Most nights they locked her in and she circled instead into a comfortable kind of resignation on their doona.
But some evenings she didn’t come back and Keely spent the whole night outside. Chester was still little then. She didn’t have the energy to care. But one night Keely had been attacked and had slid in the next morning dragging a bloody paw and a string of vet bills behind her. It could’ve been any of the dogs. There were enough of them. The block was full of trophy breeds with fat muscled jaws and heavy barks. That was the thing about finding an apartment in Sydney that still accepted pets. It was like stumbling on a rotting carcass in paddock; eventually the smell of it brought out the predators.
Of course, they could have lied to the real estate agents about the cat. Everyone else did. They could have lied and found themselves an apartment where the carpet wasn’t stained, and the lot out front still had grass. But Ivan had a thing about honesty. And work. He was always working so hard. It had seemed sweet to begin with. Now she barely saw him.
Keely’s blood never really came out of the carpet, even though she tried two different kinds of cleaning foam. She’d bought a square of acrylic carpet from the discount shop and put it over the mark by the sliding door. It sat there, a constant reminder of their dwindling bond money, and Keely had become an indoor cat.
Chester took his time with the porridge. She reheated her tea in the microwave and watched him as he spooned it in, his elbows high and wild. When he’d had enough, he stood and picked up his bowl. Leftover milk slopped over the rim and splattered to the floor. He saw it and his little face turned serious. He carried it over to her with such sweet concentration. “Finished,” he said, reaching it out to her. She felt him watching her face and she gave him a grin. “Good job,” she said. “Now you can go and play.” He bounced with the praise, then he swung his little body around and walked straight past the dozing cat on the stool. He stepped over the metal strip that marked the end of the kitchen lino and the start of the living room carpet and she saw him pause to let out a slow, meditative fart. She watched his head roll sideways with the thoughtful pleasure of it, then she went back to the sink. She wiped out the milk-slime and put his bowl on the rack, and turned back to see him settled in the corner, squatting in front of the massive, three-storey toy garage her mother-in-law had bought him. It was a grand gift and an ostentatious gesture: a way of saying move out and buy a proper house. Yes, she understood Ivan’s mother well enough, but it wasn’t that simple.
Over his shoulder, she could see a plastic doll wedged firmly in the middle level of the garage. The sequence of sound effects—the vrooms and crashes and oh no’s—told her how Chester was trying to clear the blockage. She watched his back, then she sighed and gathered up what time she could and turned it into a basket of folded washing and a half a scrubbed toilet.
It was a lot. She’d done well. Her thoughts even had time to float back together and coalesce into something. She sieved the pieces from the morning flowing around her and drifted and worked. It felt good, or as good as it ever could with a bottle of Toilet Duck.
She scrubbed, her hair swinging across her face, until she noticed him standing in the bathroom doorway, watching her. “Cat money,” he said.
She knelt back on her heels, resting the brush on the bowl, and looked at him properly then. “What, honey?”
“Cat money, mummy.” And he held out the little metal disc on Keely’s collar, the leather strap dangling down with a tinkle of the bell.
“Honey, that’s Keely’s,” she said. They weren’t the right words, but they were the only ones she could find. Her hands felt sweaty in the pink gloves.
“Cat money,” he said again.
“Yes,” she said cautiously. They’d had this conversation before. She’d explained it wasn’t real money. She didn’t want to go through it again. Then she felt the line pass under her, the crack of a lie that would no doubt need to be papered over later. “But that’s Keely’s money,” she said. “Where’s Keely, honey?”
He looked at her slowly, then his face crumpled in one of its quicksilver grins. The twin red lines on his face bent and then settled into their curve on his cheek. “My money,” he said. “My money, mummy.”
She cursed herself then. She must have vagued out. She should have been listening. She waited, as though there was still some chance he could explain what was happening. But Chester said nothing. He held the cat’s collar close to his chest and stared at the little brass name plate. Keely, it said, and then gave her mobile number in neat, Italianate numbers. She knew exactly because she was the one who’d had it engraved. What did he even think he could buy with it? Or did he just think it was enough that it was treasure?
Then she remembered Keely. Her unease started to piece itself together. How had he gotten it off her? She peeled the gloves off and stood up, squeezing past her quiet, happy son and into the hall. She felt it immediately: the chill of the spring day reaching out to wind a finger through the curls at the base of her neck. The door was open.
She saw the broomstick lying on the floor.
Oh, she thought. Her same old useless mantra. Oh, oh, oh.
No. She hadn’t realised he could be so clever, or so quick. She saw it then. She saw how he’d lifted the broomstick from its dusty track, flicked the lock and pulled the door open. He’d let the fresh air lure the cat down—the smell of freedom. And then he’d pinned her down.
The two halves of her brain detached then, uncoupling like train carriages in that heinous cartoon Chester liked to watch. They shunted off in different directions—one towards her son and the words she would have to marshal to talk to him about responsibility and pets and not opening that door, okay; the other towards the balcony and its rusted railing. It clattered into the steel and hung there, teetering over the three-metre drop to the letterbox and the dirt and the scrappy little hibiscus bush.
Keely wasn’t there.
She was gone.
She looked up then, into the suburban street she thought she knew so well. It seemed somehow more complicated now. That single straight line broke off into a thousand sudden branches and driveways and dark hollows. No. There was no telling where the cat had gone.
Chester joined her on the balcony then, wrapping his little hands around the powdery, red fretwork. Was it strong enough to hold him? She didn’t know, so her hand found his shoulder and gently eased him back. She looked out into the street and listened to the dogs bark, calling out their dominance over the neighbourhood. It was almost time for his nap.
“Mummy?”
She would come back. Of course. Of course, she would. But the thought wouldn’t settle.
She didn’t want to wait.
She wheeled Chester around and guided him back inside, sliding the door shut and kicking the broomstick back into place. She led him past his bedroom, down to the shoe rack in the hall, and sat him on the floor. She found his shoes, and her own, and the keys. Then she set him back on his feet and reached for his hand again.
She held onto it, warm and wriggling in hers, and she took him with her to look.
ENDS
December 18, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tanya Vavilova is an emerging writer preoccupied with liminal spaces and outsider perspectives—by life on the margins. She was recently shortlisted for Overland‘s Neilma Sidney, Overland‘s Fair Australia, Alan Marshall and Katharine Susannah Prichard awards, and commended for the Newcastle, Lane Cove, Stuart Hadow and Feast Festival prizes. ‘Artichoke Hearts’ is the winner of the Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize in 2018. Her debut collection of essays We are Speaking in Code is forthcoming from Brio in 2020.
Artichoke Hearts
Felix gets off at her usual stop, taps off and takes the stairs two at a time. The sky is the same indigo as her jeans, clouds looking ready to burst.
She crosses the road where the IGA logo glows red and white. The building looks freshly painted, the glass doors Windexed to a perfect sheen.
A woman exits the bottle shop clutching a brown paper bag. Her gaze lingers on Felix. And then she collects herself and strides down the street, a man in a cap following her at a distance of two feet.
Felix takes this all in, before walking through the glass doors of the supermarket.
She heads straight for the canned and pickled goods—the marinated peppers, the jars of olives, artichokes in oil—except they’re gone. Moved someplace else. She picks up a packet of spaghetti from the shelf, puts it down.
It takes three loops to locate the canned goods in aisle 6.
As Felix presents the jar of artichokes to the cashier, the woman smiles at her, but doesn’t say anything.
‘Thank you,’ Felix says.
The woman says nothing.
Snatching the jar, Felix strides through the glass doors.
It’s about to rain. The sky crackles like bacon on a pan. Felix has been a vegetarian for twelve years.
Across the road, the park is small and grim. Felix walks past the empty swings, past the monkey bars, choosing a bench under the fig tree. This is what happens, she thinks, when you tell a customer to lump it: you end up on a park bench in the middle of the day.
No one else is about, even the birds have gone someplace else.
She unscrews the lid of the jar. Her artichokes come all the way from Italy. She’s never been overseas, it doesn’t matter.
She dips her fingers in the marinade, plucks one artichoke, chews it carefully. The marinade drips down her chin. The hearts are slippery, hard to get a purchase on. She plucks another then another and another.
The woman from the bottle shop crosses the road without looking. Her red coat and Doc Martens belong in this city. Her brown paper bag is gone. The man in the cap, too.
The woman cuts across the park, negotiates the bulging tree roots. She pushes her fringe out of her eyes.
The first drops of rain are lazy, languorous.
Felix looks up at the clouds.
And then the woman in the red coat is standing beside her.
‘Can I sit here?’ she asks.
‘If you want.’
Felix considers the jar of artichokes, then the woman’s slender fingers, microbes, disease. ‘Would you like an artichoke?’ she asks.
‘Um, sure.’
The stranger dips her fingers in the oil and comes up with an olive.
Felix is surprised, but says, ‘I guess they’re processed in the same factory.’
‘Are they?’
They pass the jar back and forth. Once or twice their hands brush. Felix feels a tiny jolt each time, ignores it. No one says a word.
A raindrop catches on the woman’s eyelash, refracts the light.
As the rain gets heavier, Felix pushes her hood over her head, but neither woman moves.
‘What happened to the bottle?’
‘Huh?’
‘I saw you come out of the bottle shop. You bought some wine?’
The woman shakes her head. ‘That wasn’t me.’
‘And the man, what happened to the man?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The woman hugs herself to keep warm.
It rains harder, the drops beating against the tin trashcan. If Felix closes her eyes, she could be back home in Geraldton. Instead, she’s here, in this shallow, mean city. Jobless, friendless, restless.
The rain puddles in their laps.
‘You should have the last one,’ the woman says.
‘You sure?’
‘Have it,’ the woman insists, a hand on Felix’s knee. ‘It’s yours.’
The last heart is sweet and juicy.
And then the woman in the red coat is gathering up her things. ‘Thanks for the artichokes,’ she says. ‘I better be going, but maybe see you tomorrow.’
Felix considers those words. She holds the empty jar and watches the woman disappear into the trees. She thinks of running a hot shower. Turning the heater on. Wrapping herself in blankets. She tucks the jar in her satchel and stands up.
On her way home, she passes the fruit shop and the pub with the go-go dancers. A woman in a yellow raincoat pushes open the door, looks at the sky.
When Felix reaches her block of flats, she sees someone has left the entrance open.
She takes two flights up, patting her pockets for the keys. The stubborn door opens with a groan, lets out a gust of stale air.
Felix strips off her wet clothes, and turns the rusty taps in the shower. Wishes she had a bath.
Her jeans sprawl on the tiles like another pair of legs.
She adds her empty artichoke jar to the stash under the sink. They look nice there, like old friends. The saved marinade is the real treat—for a special occasion.
Felix stands under the showerhead and watches the tiny room fill up with steam.
***
The next day, Felix wakes refreshed. Wonders if she’s made a new friend.
It’s another chilly, drizzly day. Coat and scarf weather. Gloves and beanie.
She buys another jar of artichokes from the smiling but silent cashier. Hopes for a magic olive, like a four-leaf clover. For luck, good fortune.
When she arrives at the park, the woman in the red coat is already there.
‘Hey,’ the woman says, patting the bench.
‘Hey. I’m Felix by the way.’
‘Hannah.’
Felix sits down, puts the jar of artichokes between them. The park is theirs again. No one else is about.
‘Artichoke?’
‘Thanks,’ Hannah says, reaching for the jar. ‘I bought some chips. You eat chips?’
They have a feast.
A grey butcherbird watches them from the fig tree.
Felix wonders if the woman is jobless, but it doesn’t seem right to ask. And then she notices the manicured nails: turquoise.
The only sound is the light rain and the crunch of chips. They are crinkle-cut, chicken. Felix vaguely wonders if she should be eating them—are they vegetarian?—but it doesn’t matter, not really, because she has a friend.
When she looks up, Hannah is studying her profile.
‘You have a nice nose,’ she says.
Felix is shy.
‘I wish a had a nice nose like yours.’
Hannah squeezes her knee.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a nose like that.’
They watch the butcherbird impale a lizard on a stick.
‘That’s nature for you,’ Felix says before plucking another artichoke.
‘Shame there’s no olive today.’
‘Yeah, I was hoping—
A man zig-zags across the park.
It’s the man in the cap.
Felix’s insides spin like a washing machine.
‘Hannah,’ the man booms. ‘Are you coming home?’ He opens a broad, black umbrella, holds it out.
‘Yeah,’ she says, then to Felix, quietly: ‘Another time.’
Felix hopes she means the same time tomorrow. ‘See you,’ she calls, but they are already gone.
The butcherbird looks down from her branch.
***
The next day Felix waits in the park, but Hannah doesn’t show up.
The day after, Felix stays in bed reading comics.
On Thursday, the stars align, and Hannah and Felix sit under the dome of the kids’ slippery slide. The rain batters the hard red and yellow plastic.
‘I missed you the other day,’ Hannah says.
‘Same here.’
Their legs are touching in the cramped space. Pink bubble gum is stuck to the sole of Hannah’s Doc Marten.
They pass the jar of artichokes back and forth.
‘They come from Italy,’ one of them says.
‘Like tomatoes and pasta.’
Hannah touches Felix’s face.
‘You’ve got a little fleck of artichoke there,’ she says, gently brushing it off.
Felix turns pink.
Hannah’s nails are gold today, like the artichokes.
‘There you go, all gone.’
The artichokes are salty, acidic. Texture like paper. They could be eating raffia.
‘$2.99 a jar,’ Felix says, aloud.
‘Bargain.’
Two myna birds play on the swings, like kids.
‘I like your red coat.’
Hannah grins. ‘Ta. It’s a Lisa Ho original, from Vinnies.’
Felix touches the fabric, catches her reflection in the round, metallic buttons.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ she says.
Hannah’s lips are lilac, chapped. She smiles.
The wind changes direction, the rain coming sideways.
Water slaps their cheeks.
‘Another artichoke?’
‘Thanks.’
They keep eating.
Eventually, Hannah says, ‘Dave will be wondering where I am.’
And then she slides feet-first through the blue tunnel, waves and is gone.
They meet up the following day, too. Felix brings artichokes, Hannah a bottle of Sprite. They talk a little, laugh, the fizzy drink makes them burp. And they make a plan.
On the seventh day, Felix drags a shopping buggy to the park. It rattles like a gift.
Hannah waves her over to the fig tree. They share red wine in a silver bladder.
Later they bump along the road with the buggy. And then they’re standing in front of a peeling door.
Felix follows her friend up the stairs.
Their gumboots quack on the lino.
‘Dave’s out,’ Hannah says.
She jiggles the deadbolt. ‘So this is me,’ she says, gesturing to the combined kitchen-dining-living.
‘It’s nice.’
‘Yeah, it’s alright.’
Both women are shivering from the cold and wet. They’d sat in the park for hours, until some kids with sticks came along.
Hannah thinks for a moment, says, ‘should I run us a bath then?’
Felix looks at her shoes. ‘Go on, then.’
‘There are some towels in that closet.’ Hannah points behind her.
The closet is mint green, double doors.
‘It’s lovely,’ Felix says.
‘It’s IKEA.’
As Hannah’s getting the bath ready, Felix wanders in with the towels. ‘Wish I had a bath.’
‘This afternoon, you do.’ Hannah glances behind her. ‘You want to get the buggy?’
Felix wheels it from the front room, down the tiny passage between kitchen and bathroom. She takes the empty jars out lovingly one by one, and lines them up around the bathtub.
‘So why do you save the marinade from the artichokes?’ Hannah asks.
‘I just always have.’
The room starts to fill up with steam.
Felix has been waiting for this moment a long, long time.
The two women kneel in front of the tub and unscrew one jar at a time, pouring the marinade in. Flecks of garlic, chilli, green float in the steaming water.
A petal of artichoke escapes from a jar.
They strip their clothes off, and Hannah tests the water with a toe. ‘Nice and hot,’ she declares, before stepping over the lip.
Felix hugs her chest, slipping in opposite.
‘You’re shy, huh?’ Hannah says. She is taller than Felix and her apricot-breasts sit above the watermark.
Hannah lights a coconut candle, resting it on the edge of the tub. The flame dances and spits. The room smells like a spa and a pickling factory.
‘Is marinade flammable?’ Hannah says.
‘I dunno.’
They laugh at that. How funny if their skin caught fire, then the room caught fire then the flat then the block then the street.
Hannah throws her head back and washes it in the marinade. Her forearms are covered in tiny scars.
‘Come here,’ she says. ‘Let me wash your hair.’
Felix turns clumsily around in the bath. Her back to Hannah, she looks out the window that faces the grey street.
The rain spits at the leaded glass.
As Hanna massages her scalp, Felix feels herself loosen, sink further into the water. Both women smell of vinegar.
Afterwards, Felix half-leans out of the tub, picks something off the floor.
‘Shall we crack one open?’ she asks, holding up a fresh jar.
‘Definitely.’
They chew the artichokes, saying little. Felix rinses her arm in the water. And then their knees bump in the tub, and they giggle. A little water spills over the lip.
Hannah drops a rubber duck in the water, and they watch it navigate the sludge. Felix remembers being bathed with her baby sister, the two of them squealing and splashing, driving their mother wild.
Hannah tops up the hot water. They eat some more artichokes.
Felix works up the courage to ask about Dave.
‘He’s my soulmate,’ Hannah says.
The yellow duck nods in agreement.
Felix remembers the first day they met. ‘Why did you lie about coming out of the bottle shop with Dave?’ she asks.
‘I didn’t want him to get in the way’—she cups the water in her hands, letting it cascade—‘of all of this.’
Felix does not ask any more questions.
They chew quietly, passing the jar between them. And then Hannah dips her hand in the jar, and ‘—an olive!’
‘You found the four-leaf clover!’
They hold it up to the flickering globe, marvel at this message from the gods. This green olive in a jar of artichokes.
‘We should split it,’ Hannah says. ‘I know, come here,’ she says, pulling Felix towards
her. ‘Let’s bite into it at the same time so the good luck can’t escape, you know?’
Felix doesn’t know. ‘Okay,’ she says, bravely.
Hannah positions the olive in Felix’s mouth then leans forward, bites down on her half, their lips and noses touching.
Felix blushes, tingles.
A diamond beetle flies in through the window. Blue-black magic.
At this signal, Hannah nods, and the women tear the olive in half with their teeth.
They are giddy with luck.
The beetle crawls along the soggy bathmat.
Felix wishes she had a whole jar of olives so they could do that again and again and again. She’s never had a friend like Hannah.
When the sky turns red and orange, they decide to get out of the tub but it’s hard to get a purchase on the slippery porcelain. They sink back into the artichoke juice, shrieking, laughing, then they try to stand again, grab onto each other’s arms, sink back, stand, sink, stand, sink, laugh, giggle and grope, until the water cools, and Felix pulls the plug.
December 12, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
No Friend But The Mountains
by Behrouz Boochani
translated by Omid Tofighian
Picador
ISBN: 9781760555382
Reviewed by HOA PHAM
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, playwright and activist whose book, No Friend But the Mountain was written by text message over a couple of years on Manus Prison. The resulting work is a powerful, readable memoir with poetry that is a searing indictment of the offshore detention regime. His other works of documentation include writing for The Guardian, a play ‘Manus‘, and a film ‘Chauka, please Tell us the Time‘.
Behrouz’s Boochani’s choice of words describing Manus Island as a prison is deliberate as is the positioning of his book by his translator, Omid Tofighan, as more than just refugee literature. Tofighan sees the work as part of a tradition of prison literature, which includes Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a memoir from Auschwitz. As well, he considers it to be transnational literature in nature.
Like Frankl, Behrouz has chosen to resist the oppressive system of the prison thus retaining his humanity in the face of inhumane acts. For instance he withdraws from the community of the prison and craves solitude. He chooses activism and to maintain an intellectual life with artistic pursuits regardless of his surroundings. He is a keen observer of what is around him and much of the book consists of his detailed descriptions of his fellow inmates.
Behrouz terms the socio-political order of Manus Prison the Kyriarchal System in which prisoners are set up to hate each other and the power of Australia’s industrial colonial complex which is made apparent through the hierarchy of the Australian guards, officials, and the local Papu (Papua New Guinean) guards.
Behrouz Boochani describes what happens to prisoners individually, a piece of meat with a mind, where daily routine is meaningless. Memories of childhood emerge and the mind turns in on itself, he reflects. This happens to Behrouz when he in a moment of respite, climbs onto the roof of the prison and remembers his war torn childhood. He does not know who he is anymore nor does he know what he will become.
The Kyriarchal system drives one to collapse and demise. Boochani reveals the state of his mind and his suffering through poetry which punctuates the written text. The poetry brings a sense of immediacy to the work and intimacy with Behrouz’s experiences. However, one wonders what has been lost in translation especially after reading Tofighan the translator’s notes which refer to the Kurdish literary traditions Behrouz draws from, which are unfamiliar to most Australians. His prose in English is simple and direct; the descriptions evoke details that horrify in a matter of fact way.
Creativity, Boochani feels, is one of the only ways to resist the Kyriarchal system. He chooses art and literature, feeling it is the best way to depict the horror of Manus Prison.
Behrouz Boochani tells a tale of two islands. One is Australia where the settlers are imprisoned. The other is Manus Prison where the incarcerated refugees’ minds are creative and free. Behrouz comments in the notes that all Manus prisoners have evolved into creative beings, a transformation that is remarkable. Boochani writes of one of the prisoners, Maysam the Whore, who sings and dances every night in the prison:
“Someone who is so brave and so creative; he flexes these attributes through his muscles, muscles he uses to challenge The Kyriarchal System of the prison. He employs a beautiful form of rebellion that has enormous appeal for the prisoners. A man with boyish features who uses them to peddle poetry and to satirise all the serious aspects of the forlorn prison. The spirit of Maysam The Whore contrasts with the desert of solitude and horror of the prison. This is like a reward for the prisoners; a gift in the form of a collective response, a collaborative effort among men who have been banished.” (Kindle Locations 2244-2248).
Tofighan describes the work as horrific surrealism with psychoanalytical tendencies. The characters described by Behrouz are amalgams of real refugees. They tap into archetypes such as Our Golshiftel (the Mother,) Maysam the Whore (trickster and entertainer,) the Smiling Youth, and the Gentle Giant. Only the latter two are given names, at their times of death in the narrative, Hamid and Reza respectively.
The beauty of the prose and poetry of this work uplifts what is terrible subject material. Somehow it manages to impart the best of humanity through Behrouz’s eyes, and the communal ability to survive horrific circumstances. The acts of kindness and brotherhood exhibited by the prisoners to each other are preciously detailed. He says of a prisoner, Reza, who offers mangoes to others despite the Kyriarchal System:
“The Gentle Giant challenges this way of thinking with his childlike generosity. He confronts them with a different way of being, he offers them new horizons, access to a better reality.” (Kindle Locations 3628-3629).
Tofighan questions whether empathy can ever truly be achieved through literature. I believe that Behrouz’s words do create empathy and illustrates the truth of offshore detention.
In No Friend But the Mountain, Behrouz Boochani wishes to hold a mirror to the system, dismantle it and produce a historical record of it. Boochani has certainly depicted the inhumanity of Manus Prison. By documenting and publishing he has produced a historical record. The transfer of men for medical reasons from Manus by the Morrison government has been delayed till at least February so it is yet to become history; it is still very much part of the present suffering for the men left behind. This document pays testimony to their plight and experiences and one hopes it will become history sooner rather than later.
Citations
Boochani, Behrouz. ‘A Kyriarchal System: New Colonial Experiments / New Colonial Resistance‘
Boochani, Behrouz. No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, Pan Macmillan Australia, 2018. Kindle Edition.
HOA PHAM is an award-winning Vietnamese Australian author who lives in Melbourne. Her latest book is Our Lady of the Realm.
December 10, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
All My Goodbyes
by Mariana Dimópulos
translated by Alice Whitmore
ISBN : 9781925336412
Giramondo
Reviewed by Jeffrey Errington
In 1907 after living and writing in Europe since he was a young man, Henry James, aged a pinch below 60, sat down at his desk in New York and decided that that writing a novel was like looking through a self-made aperture of a “million-windowed” mansion. Inside was society’s dirty secrets and the position of the viewer glaring at these peccadillos was to frame its revelation. For Argentinian novelist and translator Mariana Dimópulos the house of fiction has become a rotting abode in a decrepit suburb. Not a stately Victorian home but a grotto; one flipped inside out to reveal yellowed bones grafted on as exoskeletons. Europe is stagnating. In All My Goodbyes, the main character’s (who remains unnamed for the entire novel) is listening to her boyfriend give:
“..extremely valid reasons (valid because they were his) why I should continue living in that den of European traditionalism, with its 500-year-old houses and its balconies dripping with flowers. He mentioned books, the peace and quiet, the university. If you found it hard to think, you could just head to the forest or to Italy, which served as something of a last resort for all melancholy Germans. The age of travelling the world and marvelling at other people’s poverty was over. And yet he still felt the weight of an entire continent on his shoulder” (p. 87).
She has no such weight and so moves like a leaf down a windswept strabe. She is the Antipodean answer to the centre, unweighted by its shifting traditions. Her character arrives in a Europe to find, disappointingly, that that culture has long been exhausted. She looks through the window, winces and chooses to voice no response, and moves right along.
All My Goodbyes is a short novel where the nameless main character wishes to escape Argentina to Europe. In the Continent she enters into a peripatetic existence, almost as if she were trapped in sleepwalking and returns to Argentina and then to the far south of Patagonia where she becomes embroiled in a brutal axe murder. Dimópulos’s touch-stone writer seems to be Thomas Bernhard and she has mastered and extended the Bernhardian mode: the controlled raving is accented and solidified by a non-linear ordering of the chronology, giving the structure a Cubist presentation. Her mastery is apparent as the reader is never confused as to where in the chronology the action is occurring. This structure relieves the characters of the burden of time as the Cubist narrative does not progress towards the final act (the killing of her lover and her lover’s mother) but the scenes are broken up and then grouped thematically. The structure of Dimópulos’ language supports the complexity of her protagonist’s crossing of European borders. A recognisable refrain in the syntax of the novel is heard when the final clause of a sentence or paragraph cancels out the truth that was asserted by its opening subject. The following examples illustrate this self-contradicting parataxis:
“They asked me for help and I told them there was no way I was going into the sea to rescue their horrible ball. That last bit is a lie. Nobody ever asked me anything” (p. 19).
“I could cross over to one side and say one thing and then cross over to the other side and believe the exact opposite.” (p. 31)
“It’s not true that we leave a place when the future is adorned with beautiful visions of faraway travels. We leave one morning, the morning after any given evening or the afternoon after any given midday, just when we’d decided to stay forever.” (p. 84).
“He removed his scarf, tied it around my next. We hugged and I promised him so many things: that I’d come back, that I loved him, all of them lies.” (p. 114).
One of the main character’s various jobs is at IKEA. Here she finds Europe in its purest form: sterile, easy to digest, useful and entirely supported by the labour of non-Europeans – a place where people go for the “narcotic” effects of a state of “pleasantness” (p. 42). It’s ironic that she is working here because IKEA represents the very thing that she wants to avoid – usefulness: “Being useful is of no use to me” (p. 14.) To deepen the irony, in a country where the language is not her own, she simply exists and language no longer serves a purpose. When she works in a German bakery she is frequently agitated as her German vocabulary is riddled with gaps, leading to misunderstanding between her and the boss, and the customers. This leads to her not knowing the German word for “jar” and her trying to break one in frustration but the jar rolls along the floor and still doesn’t break. So that “[a]t that moment, more than ever, I despise the Germans’ world-famous quality-assurance standards” (p. 91). Her constant movement is to avoid the pressure to perform a pejorative and menial task, which has been forced upon her both because of her Argentinian heritage and her gender. Without this language ability she comes across to all Germans as someone with no inner life. She pushes back as, “my tongue, as we all know, was still asleep in its Spanish dream” (pp. 62-63).
What she seems to be searching for is a community that is based on recognition. A place where the people recognise and accept her. Europe does not recognise her according to this logic. And she can not find it at home in Argentina either. In the wilds of Patagonia her identity exists in a state of perpetual flux as she is not even sure if she herself was not the one who used the axe to hack apart her lover Marco and Marco’s mother, Lady Dupin. Perhaps she is guilty, perhaps not. She certainly, like Ivan Karamazov, feels an ideological guilt for the crime that occured. Saying goodbye is her ideology, even if it means accommodating the death of her lover to render this scene impossible for her to re-enter, either in time or space. She accepts no responsibility for any one and she asks for none in return. She will never have the community that she longs for as she accepts that she has nothing in common with anyone else. She barely has anything in common with herself. She only accepts that her lover has become truly unknown when he can only become expressed in the past-tense:
“I never saw any of them again. I never spoke to any of them again, never replied to any of their messages. I put an end to them all, I didn’t leave a trace, didn’t feel a trace of remorse. There are all my crimes: all my goodbyes” (p. 140).
All My Goodbyes is an astonishing novel. It situates itself to the novel and to Europe with a level of sophistication that is, sometimes, lacking in Australian fiction. The translation of this novel by Giramondo contributes to the Australian literary ecosphere, and is to be celebrated. Particular mention must go to the translator, Alice Whitmore. Whitmore has successfully shepherded this novel from its Spanish language mode into an English language mode while maintaining the prose’s Spanish language strangeness. She does this by maintaining a near pitch-perfect tone throughout.
JEFFREY ERRINGTON recently finished his PhD in English at the University of Adelaide. He has previously been published in The Quarterly Conversation and Jacket Magazine.
December 2, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michelle Hamadache has had publications in Australian and international publications such as Southerly, Island, Cordite, Parallax and Antipodes. She is a lecturer at Macquarie University and managing editor for Mascara Literary Review.
The Heart and the Choke
‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’
These were the words spoken by a small tourist from Avignon to my mother-in-law, Fatima, while she and I were standing in a queue for crepes at our local markets, one wet Sunday morning in August. Were it not for my hubris and my love of artichokes, Fatima and I would never have been at those damned markets in the first place.
I’m not really territorial, but when ymar suggested that I should do my shopping over in Greenacre, where my brother-in-law lives, I was offended. It’s true, Sydney’s northern beaches are expensive. What with the beaches and headlands, we like to call the peninsula God’s Country. There’s no doubt you pay more to live here. $3 dollars an artichoke in Woolworths. Sometimes more.
‘Wesh tercul, Michelle? Karnoun?’
Though it wasn’t quite seven in the morning, the decision about what to cook for dinner is made early when ymar is staying. Karnoun, cooked with grated onion and cinnamon, is one of my favourites dishes, but in what was either a dig at the prices in Dee Why or a genuine act of forgetting, ymar shook her head and said, but no. Not karnoun. Artichokes cost too much over here. Bizef. You can get a bunch for $5 in Greenacre. Still too much, but what can you do? Hagdah.
‘We have Sunday markets. We do—let’s go. We’ll take the girls.’
Ξ
Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes. A foreign language can be off-putting.
Ξ
I was nineteen the first time I saw an artichoke. I was handed a list torn from the small black spiral notebook Signora Crivelli-Visconti carried with her for such occasions when she felt sure that I would be unequal to the task of committing to memory her shopping list, or when I was just so seriously ignorant of even the nature of the items requested, she despaired not just for my fate, but for the fate of Australians in general. Una razza incredibile, if I were anything to go by.
- 1) 3 carciofi
- 2) gli odori di brodo
- 3) un’ etto di parmigiano grattugiato
Later that evening—after I had mutely handed over La Signora’s list to Clara at the fruttivendolo on the corner of Via Pinturicchio and Corso Garibaldi, and Clara had handed me back a plastic bag with three thorny looking things and a carrot, onion, a piece of celery and a sprig of parsley, and I had then walked to the alimentari, cleared my throat and asked for un etto di grana padana . . . grattugiato, per favore, then dawdled home, lighting a cigarette and stopping along the way for a café corretto alla sambucca—Signora Crivelli-Visconti disarmed me of my paring knife and set to work on the artichoke-things herself. You are no more useful than a drowned baby.
Ξ
‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’
I really can’t explain why, when my French is pretty good, and I’m married to a Kabyle Algerian, have three half-Kabyle-Algerian, half-Australian children, I couldn’t work out what the short tourist from Avignon, with his silver sideburns and tired-looking wife, was saying to Fatima. I understood when he asked Fatima where she was from when he overheard us speaking in French—the language, mixed with Algerian, that Fatima and I share. I understood when Fatima replied that she was Algerian. Even a dimwit would understand when Avignon queried if she were Kabyle, to which Fatima assented. So why I couldn’t understand Avignon when he stated that Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes, I can’t explain. Especially considering the fact he repeated the accusation three times.
I can’t imagine anyone, even someone who didn’t speak a word of French, not figuring out that ‘bombes’ = bombs.
‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’
‘Il y a des mauvaises partout,’ replied my mother-in-law.
Ξ
Kabyles
Now a family of eight needs approximately 120 kilos of wheat for just one month’s worth of bread. I was told that the indigents (italics mine) I saw had to make their 10 kilos last the entire month, supplementing their meagre grain supply with roots and the stems of thistle, which the Kabyles, with bitter irony, call the ‘artichoke of the ass.’
Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles
Ξ
I really have a lot to thank Signora Crivelli-Visconti for:
- 1) Mastering the fine art of manifesting polite disinterest when hand-washing dirty undies under the supervision of the owner of said dirty undies
- 2) Not firing me when I broke an 18th Century family heirloom when dusting on my second day at the job
- 3) Gaining competency in the highly versatile and sought-after skill of artichoke preparation.
Ξ
‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’
‘Il y a des mauvaises partout,’ replied my mother-in-law. At the time that seemed like a strange, rather serious, observation to make in passing to a stranger, though, of course, it is true that there are bad people the whole world over. I nodded amicably, firstly to my mother-in-law, then to Avignon. Besides, ymar looked so regal, so wise and imperturbable, in the carmine marl of her headscarf that I would have agreed with her no matter what she said.
Ymar = mum ≠ mother-in-law.
I turned and smiled at Avignon, which oddly, I thought, made him repeat for the third time, Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes, with a rather lingering gaze at me.
I’m friendly by nature, disingenuous even, so I broadened my smile to include his tired-looking wife in our exchange. The inclusiveness of my smile was rewarded by the wife, who informed me—in a French I understood aucune problème— she was enjoying her holiday in Sydney, though she’d wished they’d been able to travel over Christmas, when they’d have missed out on a northern winter and would have had the opportunity to swim at Australian beaches. Winter in Sydney can be miserable, I commiserated. She was a high-school teacher, and the rather drab casual wear and the worn backpack that looked as though it travelled with her through the school term as well as over the seas gave the impression they were budget travellers. I’d gamble that this was the furthest they’d been, maybe even a trip of a lifetime, but they looked to me like they weren’t enjoying their holiday.
To be fair to them both, it was very cold too—in fact, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say the rain had turned to sleet, and the markets, never good in the wet, had transformed into a slush pile.
You’d think the rain would put people off, but the need for soda bread, organic vegetables and cheeses fermented in someone’s garage was far more pressing than the opportunity to sleep in on a Sunday. Market-goers pressing in, irritated that you were blocking the thoroughfare, though all you were doing was standing in line for crepes. In one way or the other, the markets that day were a strong contender for a modern day fourth, or maybe seventh, circle of hell and our own quest for artichokes took on diluvial dimensions.
Ξ
Kabyles
I am looking right now at the time cards of farmworkers on the Sabaté-Tracol estates in the region of Bordj-Menaïel.
On one card I see the figure 8 francs, on another 7, and on a third 6.
The official estimate of the value of a day’s labor service is 17 francs.
The sirens at Tracol Farms sound during the high season (which is now) at 4 A.M., 11., A.M., 12 noon, and 7 P.M. That adds up to 14 hours of work.
I want to mention that the unjustifiable length of the working day is aggravated by the fact that the typical Kabyle worker lives a long way from where he works. Some must travel more than 10 kilometers round trip. After returning home at 10 at night, they must set out again for work at 3 in the morning after only a few hours of heavy sleep. You may be wondering why they bother to go home at all. My answer is simply that they cling to the inconceivable ambition of spending a few quiet moments in a home that is their only joy in life as well as the object of all their concerns.
Albert Camus, ‘Wages’ The Algeria Chronicles
Ξ
Just one artichoke, but Signora Crivelli-Visconti’s kitchen table is such a mess of sharp little petals, some shorn off with the serrated knife La Signora left out, some torn away by anxious fingers afraid of getting in trouble for being too slow, for not having followed the very simple instructions La Signora meted out on her way out the door. Remember, I’ve shown you once already.
Anxious fingers. A hand that briefly held the artichoke aloft in the empty kitchen as though it were a sceptre, jousted with it once, before the owner of the hand felt so silly because after all she was nineteen, not nine, that she got to work, but not before the macabre thought crossed her mind that the owner of the hands was also something of a butcher.
There’s so little of the artichoke you can eat, but when you stare into the pale denuded heart of the thing, with its coronet tinged with violet, what you see is a tiny bowl. When you look even more closely, you see that the bowl is marked like skin, or like a geometric pattern repeating over and over again, until it feels as though you’re falling and you want to reach your finger into that tiny vaulted surface, as though your finger were the finger of god and the world were turned upside down, inverted, so the ceiling of heaven, of the Sofia mosque, was right there beneath your poised fingertip waiting for you to reach into it, but then you don’t because you are snapped to attention by the turn of a key in a twice-locked door and the flick of switch in a dusk-darkened room so that a cruel light explodes and all is lost.
Ξ
When Algeria was a colony of France, Algerians ended up with roughly a seventh of the 588 million acres that make up Algeria. There’s just no point putting the effort into empire unless the profit margins are good—but Algeria is tough going. 80% desert. A lot of really steep mountains that are like a great wall that run the breadth of the country. No major river systems. Just a few small tracts of fertile land that are as perfectly suited to viniculture as to the growing of wheat.
Ξ
I saw some Arabs lounging against the tobacconist’s window. They were staring at us silently, in the special way these people have—as if we were blocks of stone or trees (54).
Camus, Albert, The Outsider, Penguin Books: Great Britain (1966).
Ξ
GLOBE ARTICHOKES
3 for $10
Ξ
Without the three years working for Signora Crivelli-Visconti, I would never have gotten the job of aged-carer at Wesley Gardens: Italian Division. $11:45 an hour. A whole $1 more than my monolingual fellow carers because I could speak Italian and prepare both il brodo and artichokes: lessati and al forno.
Signora Falvo, from Giuzzeria, Calabria, wasn’t a ‘Signora’ with a ‘La’ and a capital ‘S’, though she was over ninety. Most days Signora Falvo worked in her garden, where she primarily grew tomatoes and beans. Her son worked at the family fruit market and would bring home a clothes basket full of artichokes, mostly with drooping stems and sagging crowns because they’d sat so long on the shelves and were really ready for composting. I’d sit at the table with Signora Falvo, who’d lost her sight, but could still reduce an artichoke to its heart without drawing blood, and together we’d boil them up and bottle them.
Signora Falvo lived through famine. The famine in Southern Italy at the turn of the twentieth century that sent waves of Italian migrants rippling across the oceans. You don’t throw away anything when you’ve lived through famine. Not even a rotting thistle.
Ξ
Karnoun isn’t a favourite dish of the Hamadache family. It’s right down the list, beside la pate (pasta) and le riz (rice), and divides the family down the middle: those who’d prefer to eat karnoun than go hungry, and those who’d prefer to go hungry than eat artichoke. Either way it’s an economic dinner. My husband learnt first to accept karnoun from his mother. Then he learnt to accept the dish served up by his wife.
Ξ
It’s just so excellent to have a territory that is both yours and not yours. Yours enough to set-off a bomb legitimately, but not yours enough for it to matter what happens after the bomb.
Gerboise Bleue: detonated 13th February 1960. Reggane, Algeria. 70 kilotons
Ξ
The Algerian summer of 2001 was the summer of war. I was young enough to still feel that I needed to shuffle my mother-in-law down in the order of my husband’s heart, and every encounter between the two of us was either a triumph or a defeat. No married man should adore his mother the way Amine does. My mother had told me a son was a son until he found a wife. The real estate of my husband’s heart was mine. It’s a primal thing, and so it was a war of the artichokes, though only I was fighting. Fatima’s fingers are short, better suited to speed, but then I’d been a kitchen hand for years.
Fatima gave me the sink—she took the bench. In hindsight, I think she knew. We were back to back, Fatima and I. Each of us a catafalque of artichokes at our side. The kitchen was hot. 47° Celsius. August heat is infernal, and it completely makes sense to cook lunch at seven in the morning, but don’t you think a cold lunch—salad, a sandwich—would do? Do you know how many artichokes it takes to feed a family of 10?
Ξ
After the bomb. Après la bombe. Dopo la bomba. بعد القنبلة. I want to make a concrete poem with all the words for bomb in all the languages of the world shaped into a giant mushroom cloud.
Ξ
Artichokes are cheap in Algiers, which makes sense. Aren’t thistles more of a weed than a plant? Are they sown and then reaped, or reaped without sowing? Or is it that all plants are weeds? All weeds plants? Or are thistles a family all of their own? Does a plant need to be grown in a row, as part of a larger field, fenced in and belonging to someone in order to be civilised? How should I know? Let’s ask Avignon. Anyway. You’re looking at about 1 cent per choke, and at a pinch a meal of thistles will keep starvation for another day.
Ξ
The loneliest photo I’ve ever seen is in the Museum of the Martyrs, Algiers. On the small brass plaque of my memory the date below the photo is November 1, 1954. The photo is equal parts sky and ground and the only way you know the terrain is steep is because there is a single figure halfway between earth and sky positioned in a way that only happens when the rise is almost vertical. He is walking away from the photographer. There are no clouds, no trees. Just bitten-back grass, rocks and clods of dirt.
The figure in the photo is a peasant-man. Thin. His burnoose and headdress have the coarseness of textiles not produced by machine. Threads woven as fine as fingers can. The drift of continents beneath his feet, degraded soil, and the settling of his will and destiny in a camera lens and soft tissue of a photographer. I think of a man whose days are about to be done by what he carries on his back. I think of a man who came into this world a bloody newborn. All the days of his life that escaped this photo. I think of waking up in a world where I can’t lie down when I’m tired, can’t eat when I’m hungry. The small cruelties of words and looks.
Ξ
Abbreviated Chronology of the Events of the Algerian War for Independence from France (1954-62)
November 1, 1954: Toussaint Rouge. All the bloody saints. All the bloody bombs.
Ξ
Avignon didn’t order a chocolate crepe—he had one with smoked salmon and crème cheese that arrived before his wife’s crepe, or ours. I wondered at the way he ate: a livid sliver of salmon remaining on his lips a second too long, the spittle a thin white-coat until his tongue flicked it off. Not a ‘don’t mind me starting’ to his wife, not so much as a nod to us. Later, as ymar, the girls and I were driving back home from the markets, I turned to ymar and asked what was that French man saying. Schmait. Il a dis que les Kabyles faisent les bombes, and of course because it was ymar, I understood immediately. The story Avignon shared with us was the story of himself. The one he held to, recited, brought with him across the seas, would return with, whispering in the ear of his wife when she was near enough to hear. The story he read in his morning paper, watched on the evening news while sipping the head from his evening beer. The story repeated, no doubt to anyone who would listen, including those, like me, who just couldn’t hear what he was saying. I can’t imagine a story like his, so I’ve held onto that story differently. Returned to it and pondered it like it were a strange beast guarding the gates of hell.
Ξ
KARNOUN
1000 DA
Ξ
A SMALL FRENCH MAN FROM AVIGNON WHILE HOLIDAYING IN SYDNEY SAYS TO A HEJAB-WEARING ALGERIAN THAT KABYLES MAKE BOMBS.
Although the older woman, who didn’t want her name released, replied that there are bad people everywhere, the tourist repeated the racially-motivated attack three times. Witnesses, who didn’t speak French and admitted to speaking only English, had no idea what had just occurred. More disappointing was that the woman’s daughter-in-law, who speaks both French and English and also asked to remain anonymous, didn’t do a thing, so that the Sunday Fresh Produce Markets, usually a mecca for shoppers looking for an alternative to leviathan conglomerates, was transformed into a site of racial vilification. The French man repeated his attack not once, not twice, but three times. Kabyles make bombs. Kabyles make bombs. Kabyles make bombs. As though only Kabyles make bombs. As though the bombs of the Kabyles made were somehow worse than the bombs made by good Christians. As though the bombs of the Kabyles were somehow more reprehensible than the mushroom clouds above and the tumorous debris below of the nuclear bombs dropped in Hiroshoma, the Sahara and the Pacific Atolls. Maralinga. The ally bombs that drop today, right now, this minute, in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan.
Ξ
Transcribed from an interview with Kateb Yacine, Algerian Kabyle writer.
Camus? Camus? You think about Faulkner. That man was racist. But you know what? At least Faulkner wrote African Americans characters. At least there are black characters in his books. Camus. He doesn’t even know us.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WBHq-m5WHQ
Ξ
After my third choke, despondency. I couldn’t see Fatima’s progress, but I could feel her little tomato knife sawing away at outer leaves, the twitch of tough petals tearing from their centriole with a sound like second-hands ticking. Fatima’s sure fingers holding the little goblet-hearts aloft briefly before sousing them in lemon. The satisfaction. The satisfaction.
The cut along my palm wasn’t big. More of a jab than a slice, which meant it wasn’t so impressive a wound once we’d washed it clean and stopped the bleeding, but it was deep, I assured her.
‘Mais, c’est profound,’ I repeated, knowing with that groping part of my mind that profonde was the word I was looking for.
Ξ
We left the markets with:
- 2 kg potatoes
- 1 kg onions
- 1 cabbage
- 1 Irish soda bread
- 12 artichokes
We also bought 2 litres of first-press extra-virgin olive oil; mulberry jam; organic juniper hand cream and a potted red geranium for the balcony.
Ξ
The choke is white. Fibrous in a way that makes you think it would turn your throat hot, swallowing the thistledown. Spokes, a thousand-thread of strokes, the heat of asphyxiation turning vessels tight, walls thinned, translucid before bursting. A kitchen after the slaughter, before the meal: carnage of dismembered limbs lying all around—all artichokes are monopedes, did you know? Occasionally you’ll find a two-headed choke, a little like a Janus-head. One more head and you’d have a Cerberus. And afterwards, always, everywhere, pyres of littered petals, the heart nowhere, already gone.
Ξ
I blame the architect for the bomb. I blame the wall for designing the projectile. I blame Avignon for not knowing that the first bomb in the Battle of Algiers was planted in the Kasbah by a French man. I blame the newspapers for dedicating a single column to the death of x sleeping Algerians in 1956. I blame the papers for dedicating page after page, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, all the time, all the right-now, to the bombs set by Kabyles. I think you’ll find it’s called implicit bias.
Ξ
Things I wished I’d said to Avignon:
- 1) It is your fault/how dare you?
- 2) It is your fault/how dare you?
- 3) It is your fault/how dare you?
Ξ
Who ever thought an artichoke might be edible—there’s an individual with imagination. A very, very hungry human. What you have to do to get to the heart.
Ξ
That morning of hellish heat so many years ago, Fatima took my bleeding hand to her lips. I sank my cheek to her shoulder. She gave me back the knife, and I took up the last artichoke. Beneath her steady gaze, without haste, I cut through violet petals and whittled away the toughest layer of the stem. Without embarrassment, the ghost of Signora Crivelli-Visconti banished, as though I held the palm of a child in mine, knowing ymar watched, I drew circles with my finger in the hollow of my final choke. I understood. There is no order in my husband’s heart. There are no walls around the garden of his love.
November 23, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mosaics from the Map
by Robyn Rowland
ISBN: 978-1-907682-62-9
Doire Press
Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE
In 2015, Robyn Rowland published two books which seemed to be career-defining moments for her. They were the bilingual This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Chanakkale 1915 (originally with Five Island Press in Melbourne and now republished by Spinifex) and Line of Drift (with Doire Press in Galway). Between them they illustrated Rowland’s long and developing involvement with Ireland and Turkey as well as with her native Australia. Her new book, Mosaics from the Map, again from Doire Press in Galway, continues these themes and operates at the same high level of achievement.
It also reminds us of Rowland’s considerable and growing dexterity with the demands of the long poem and of poetic sequences. Both of the two 2015 books had several such poems and sequences and this one has even more. By “long” I mean poems of two or three pages plus, as opposed to half-page or one-page lyrics — or sonnets, for that matter. The risks of long poems, of course, are that they lose compression, one of poetry’s key ingredients, and can tend towards prose (even if written in strict metre). In Mosaics from the Map, Rowland has avoided these problems rather well.
There are several strategies by which she manages this, of which the most important are probably the depth of her research and her passionate identification with the subject matter. Her poems here are long because there is so much that the poet’s readers need to be aware of in order to have a sufficient comprehension of the issue.
Mosaics from the Map is divided into four sections: an introductory miscellany with several poems set in Turkey; a second biographical one focussed on the aviators Alcock and Brown; a third mainly set in Bosnia during the 1990s wars and a fourth with Australian and family references.
It may be instructive to look at one long poem from each section. The first we encounter is “Titanic — A Very Modern Story”. It’s made up of nine long-line stanzas re-telling the now well-known story of the famous 1912 shipwreck. It begins with an epigraph from a survivor, Jack B. Thayer, who surmised that “the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.”
Rowland cleverly begins every stanza with a short word or phrase to illustrate this modernity — and to emphasise all the elements of the story which have kept it relevant. “It has heroics,” she begins and goes on to talk of the radio operator, Jack Phillips, “in the Marconi wireless room /without windows” who “kept sending signals in perfect Morse”.
“It’s ‘local’,” Rowland continues in stanza two and talks about the Irish element in the story, particularly a survivor’s marriage “smothered in a deathly hush”, a husband now “shamed for his survival, /yet he’d seen so many off safe and who wouldn’t jump for a boat?”
Rowland continues in this way in subsequent stanzas covering the international dimension to the story, the role of coincidence, the role of greed in the taking of excessive risks, the sheer incompetence (“no binoculars in the crows’ nest so only fifty seconds between spotting the berg and hitting it”), the weather of the night itself (“sky jammed tight with an excess of stars”), the immediate aftermath (the rescue ship, the “Carpathian”, “a ship of widows”) and the longer-term, rather trivialising aftermath (the heroic band-leaders’ violin selling in 2013 for “one million pounds”).
Rowland’s metre, an important part of the poem, is somewhere between iambic or trochaic hexameter and free verse, an intriguing decision which risks clumsiness but in fact maintains a kind of continuity while keeping the reader’s ear guessing.
The whole poem is clearly “documentary” in intent, e.g. the facts in the Carpathia’s “loading 710 left alive from the 2200 who boarded”, and yet it’s also shot through with lyrically descriptive, if disturbing, passages such as: “The dead clustered in their / white lifebelts like flapping seagull wings in the lapping waves”. The Titanic story has been often told, usually in prose and at much greater length, but Rowland has made the event even more poignant, while at the same time somehow foreshadowing the wastage that was to occur in the conflict about to begin just over two years later.
Mosaic’s second section, “Sky Gladiatorials” is a sequence of six poems about the careers of the aviators Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown who made their reputation in World War I and then became the first to fly across the Atlantic non-stop in 1919.
The sequence starts, characteristically for Rowland who is always keen to look beyond the “received” imperial account of events, with her poem, “The Other Side of Things”. It begins from Alcock’s point of view in 1917 as he flies over Constantinople, “A city lovely in both poetry and Churchill’s dreams …” The rest is from the viewpoint of the nine-year old Turkish boy, Irfan Orga, who looks up to see “three planes appear. / He never saw such a thing, wings and whirring. He wishes / he could fly.” Then we are shown the “cartloads of lolling heads, limbs akimbo, disconnected flailing stumps and the surprised wounded …” The poem ends with a resonant couplet: “This was the first bomb. They meant to hit the war office but the bombs went wide, a man said. No-one believed him.”
The next poem in the sequence, “High, Higher: Alcock” begins again from Alcock’s point of view above the “mat of minarets / and domes” and goes on to describe the rest of his and Brown’s war experience, “knowing we made a difference, new gladiators of the sky. /We’ll win. This war will end all wars. Never again.” The irony is more than a little touching.
The third poem, “Dead Reckoning: Brown” is from Brown’s point of view above the Atlantic in 1919 and looks back over the terrors and hardships of the war, including “Fourteen months in a German camp in Claustal”. Lines like this may not sound poetic in themselves but in context they work perfectly well. It is one of Rowland’s persistent achievements that she can manage such combinations of the flat and the lyrical.
The last two poems in the sequence are concerned with Brown’s continuing PTSD (though the poet doesn’t call it that), especially during World War II in which his son, Lieutenant “Buster” Whitten-Brown was shot down on June 5/6, 1944.
Part three of Mosaics from the Map consists entirely of “War. What is it Good For?”, a nine-poem sequence set in mainly in Sarajevo in the wars of the 1990s. It emphasises the pointlessness of the conflict, the internal opposition in Belgrade to the war and its unrelenting savagery. The sequence is varied and hard to summarise but its tone and texture can be sampled perhaps with a few lines from the viewpoint of a woman in Sarajevo after the widely-reported bread queue massacre on May 27, 1992. “The knee is smooth, lovely in its meniscus-shaped curve, / thigh pale from lack of sunshine close to the torso, / and the foot, its cardboard tag, five toes pointing towards / the sun, surprised almost, caught off guard.”
It is this kind of evocative detail which takes Rowland’s apparently “political” poetry well beyond the limitations of partisanship. Although her long lines often have a rhetorical feel they are far removed from the self-interested rhetoric of the third-rate politicians who bring such damage about.
The final section of Mosaics from the Map is dominated by the sequence, “Touchstones”, in which Rowland re-creates the lives of some of her Irish ancestors, particularly her great great-grandmother, Annie Harding Lambert (1880- 1957), and the successive ravages inflicted on them by scarlet fever or scarlatina, as it was sometimes called. It’s an extended familial tribute that quite a few Australian poets (including this reviewer) have felt compelled to make over the years. And it’s always interesting to see where the emphasis is put, which maternal or paternal line is traced back and which ignored or deferred.
The “Touchstones” sequence begins with “Family Catalogue August 1880” which delineates the social and political context in Ireland when Annie was born. Several of the subsequent poems are written in the voice of Annie. The eighth poem is in the voice of her son, John, and remembers that his mother “preferred being close to a harbour, a beach, / or a river. Said her soul always rested near moving water. // On her papers they call her settler. But she never was.”
Rowland’s admiration for her great great-grandmother — and the resilience she embodied — is clear and the poet’s sustained portrait of her times more than convincing.
Significantly, in the sequence’s ninth poem, “Postscript”, Rowland makes her divided feelings for Ireland and Australia quite explicit: “I am everywhere and nowhere, longing pulses / inside the green whispering in my blood. Belonging, exile — the seesaw. / That word home — it draws itself out like a skewer.”
GEOFF PAGE is an award-winning poet and critic. His most recent collection is Hard Horizons, 2017. He edited The Best Australian Poems (2014 and 2015)
November 16, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
No Country Woman: A Memoir of Not Belonging
By Zoya Patel
Hachette
ISBN: 978 0 7336 4006 3
Reviewed by TAMARA LAZAROFF
Zoya Patel’s No Country Woman: A Memoir of Not Belonging is a collection of twelve memoir essays that explore the experience of growing up as a migrant and person of colour in Australia – in particular, negotiating the tangle of hyphens which Patel inhabits as a female Indian-Fijian-Australian. In the work, then, Patel examines identity, race and gender, from a personal standpoint. For example:
‘If anything, I have spent my life trying not to feel Fijian-Indian, desperate to prove that my cultural identity is as ‘Australian’ as that of my white friends who grew up in the same white suburbs as me, attending the same schools…’ (41).
However, she always has one eye on the broader social forces at work that have shaped her experiences and desires. Patel describes how during her childhood in the ‘90s, when Pauline Hanson’s insistent message that immigrants should ‘go back to where they came from’ was rampant across the news, she feared that the authorities would come to take her and her family away from their new Australian home (47). Similarly, Patel also reminds us that it wasn’t until 2011 that Neighbours featured its first non-white family, the Kapoors, on Ramsay Street after almost thirty years running; and that the decision was met with such opposition from Australian fans that it attracted international media attention (59). Soon after, the Kapoors were sent back ‘to where they came from’ – to India – to visit a sick relative and never returned.
In No Country Woman, there are numerous physical journeys recounted – back, to, away from, around, through – though there are never any convenient disappearances from the screen, map or storyline. Rather, the experiences of movement are thoroughly picked apart.
There is the story of Patel’s family’s migration from Fiji to the NSW town of Albury where Patel and her three siblings are teased, to put it mildly, for having skin ‘…brown like poo’ (93). There is a family ‘roots tour’ holiday to Patel’s paternal great-grandmother’s village in Gujarat where eleven-year-old Patel is first confronted with ‘meeting people not that different to me living in much worse circumstances’ (147), and the learning that this distress has a name: migrant guilt. There are also interstate day-trips to purchase salwar kameez in the Indian streets of Western Sydney’s Liverpool that elicit a different kind of shame, and encapsulate the ‘unspoken conflict between the two halves of my self’ (52); teenaged Patel trails behind her chirping mother and sisters unable to fully participate in their merriment.
Patel chooses, however, to begin the collection, in the title essay ‘No-country woman’, by detailing her first trip back to Fiji after many years absence as a twenty-eight-year-old adult. Uncomfortably, she travels with a tourist party and her white male partner, in order to attend a wedding at a ‘paradise island’ resort. The only non-white person, other than the kaiviti staff dressed in grass skirts, she feels as much a sense of injustice as she did in India. Afterwards, when she and her white partner – a union considered scandalous in South Asian cultures (12) – spend some time in Nadi, Fiji’s capital, Patel is challenged about her Fijian-Indianness by a local she meets on the street. She comes to realise that she doesn’t belong there in Fiji, either – and here lies the premise of the book. Patel is a no-country woman, always asking herself the question (and fielding the same from others): Where do I really come from? Where is my place? How and where do I fit?
In the essay ‘Money Can’t Buy Harmony’, another particularly poignant physical journey – a tragicomedy, in fact – Patel is shown exactly. A Canberran teenaged schoolgirl, she is invited to participate in a well-intentioned but not particularly well-thought-out government-funded bus tour with other teenaged people of colour. Across rural NSW they travel performing traditional dances and/or showcasing their other talents – Patel gives a speech – for umpteen school assemblies. Their purpose: to spread the message of cultural harmony and eradicate racism at its root – in the country’s youth, apparently. But, what the organisers did not consider, Patel writes, is that the reasons for some rural communities’ us-and-them attitudes may not have been simply due to misinformation or ignorance, but lack of opportunity in tight economies, ‘poverty, isolation… and [lack of] representations of diversity in the media’ (74). No amount of singing, dancing or orating was going to change that. Patel remembers vividly, during one of the Harmony Ambassadors’ performances, there was a single Vietnamese-Australian boy, in a sea of bored faces, ‘…who visibly shrank down in his seat, as if he wanted to make clear that he wasn’t associated with this ragtag mob of weirdos who all happened to be not “Aussie” (72).’
Another ‘journey’, or trajectory, examined in No Country Woman, and perhaps one of the most important, is Patel’s engagement with feminism – as a migrant and person of colour. Many readers will know that Patel is the also the founding editor of the online feminist literature and arts journal, Feminartsy, and was previously the editor of Lip Magazine, another Australia-based feminist publication – these passages are detailed in the book. Patel’s dedication to and exploration of feminism has been lengthy. But for a teenaged Patel growing frustrated with the gender norms within the Fijian-Indian community – ‘the parts…that made me feel that perhaps women weren’t valued as highly… as in my immediate family’ (82) – there didn’t seem to be much in the way of easily accessible literature to help her navigate the terrain in a way that fit with her day-to-day realities. Most of it was ‘…targeted at middle-class white women’ (214). The concept of raunch feminism, for example, felt alienating; Patel writes: ‘…I was still trying to determine whether my body was mine to dress in jeans and a normal t-shirt that didn’t entirely cover my bum’ (215).
On the flip-side, Patel reasons that for the Fijian-Indian community in Australia, like many migrant communities, the wellbeing of the group is ‘…considered more important than individual freedom’ (105) – and is a valuable position, too. Patel is at pains to add that she doesn’t want people to think talking about issues of gender inequality in Indian culture means that she favours Australian culture or sees it as progressive or culturally superior (209) – ‘Women in the West are certainly less visibly confined by gender norms, but the patriarchy is insidious, and it’s usually what you can’t see that you should be paying attention to’ (208). Rather, in No Woman Country, Patel wants to open up and make space for healthy discussion about intersectionality, the valid variances in the lived experiences of all women and feminists.
Certainly, conversation with friends – ‘almost exclusively with women…’ (116) – and years of mulling over cultural identity issues together have been imperative to the writing of and thinking through the ideas in No Country Woman (261). In perhaps one of the most moving essays in the book, ‘Kindred Spirits’, Patel traces one particularly influential female friendship from the first year of high school to the present day. Patel writes that she and Melissa, who happens to be white, ‘graduated from one obsession to another’ (97) – from ‘… horses and Harry Potter… to zines, writing… indie rock music, manga… vegetarianism, animal welfare, backpacking through Europe and, most recently, dog memes’ (97). In the spirit of mutual generosity and support, as young women they dared to dream about their future selves and careers. In fact, in year nine they both completed a week of work experience at Lip; the year was 2004 and it was a time when there was ‘…nothing more lame than feminism (100).’ Still, Patel writes that Melissa was ‘the person who, in some ways, introduced me to myself’ (97), and to an identity that saw past ‘notions of race, or gender, or purpose (116).’ Patel goes on: ‘Together, we bridged a divide that had been constructed from centuries of racial prejudice that assumed our skin colour made us so fundamentally different that our friendship would taint both of us (116)’.
No Country Woman reads as though a friend is sharing some of the most important and intimate things about her life. Thoughtful, well-researched, straightforward and often funny, the book sits closely in ‘friendship’ to other contemporary books such as Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race, Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem and Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not The Mood. The collection will appeal to a wide audience, including first, second and even third generation migrants, as well as those interested in the subjects of race, identity and intersectional feminism in contemporary Australian culture.
TAMARA LAZAROFF is a Brisbane-based writer of short fiction and creative nonfiction. She has a particular interest in hidden histories, the migrant experience, feminist and queer themes, oral storytelling traditions and celebratory stories of social interconnectedness.
November 10, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dark Matters
by Susan Hawthorne
Spinifex
ISBN: 9781925581089
Reviewed by MEL O’CONNOR
In counterpoint to how these histories have been silenced and extinguished, Susan Hawthorne, in Dark Matters, testifies to the horrifying reality of abduction and torture of lesbians—especially outspoken activist lesbians, such as Kate, the central character of the text.
This is not a quiet novel, of implications and subtlety: it is designed to upset, as human rights have been historically upset by happenings such as these. Kate is stolen from her home by men who brutalise her, in particular by attempting to ‘convert’ her to heterosexuality. Only after Kate’s death are her fragmented writings and journals from the time of her incarceration discovered by her niece, Desi, who attempts to organise and interpret them for a university research project. Dark Matters as a work lies somewhere between the research project Desi creates, and a charter of Desi’s reflections on Kate’s experiences.
Of the many notable features of Dark Matters, Hawthorne’s style is perhaps the most immediate: from her lack of descriptors on dialogue to the visceral empathy she evokes in her practised prose-poetic voice, her expertise is ever-present. In some ways, the text wars between genres—prose poetry, horror, and speculative fiction all have elements present—but it is poetry that the work most resounds with. Hawthorne employs recurrent symbols, and recalls found artefact poems, such as poetry in lines running back and forth (p5), stream-of-consciousness rhapsodising (p13), and free associative Latin, where the language runs as rampant as the wolf Kate envisions herself as. In step with prose poetry, the use of space is deliberately selective; Dark Matters swims, framing fragments as verse. When Kate’s poetry—or Desi’s found artefacts—occupy the work, they dance down the page (p29):
dance dance dance
dance the trata in your
red white and black garb
dive down dive down
dive underground
dance dance dance
dance the trata
for bread and pomegranate
dance as we have
for millennia
as is carved
on the tomb
` of the dancing women
dance a zigzag
dance the weave of a basket
dance the stars and spirals
inwards
outwards
The writing is alive and evocative—a distinctly lesbian call to motion in the style of prose poetry.
Further supporting a prose poetic angle, Hawthorne’s leitmotifs are hypnotising, not least of them the character of Mercedes. Kate’s lover before she was abducted, Mercedes’s perspective bookends the work, and indeed, she is a beacon throughout the text—“I will fill my mind with Mercedes” (p18), writes Kate, her “Querida Mercedes” (p37)—an icon of desire and desperation from page to page. This memory-Mercedes secures Kate to her identity, even throughout her torture, because Mercedes is concrete proof of Kate’s identity as a lesbian—something her abductors are desperate to erase and destroy.
Another leitmotif is the figure of the eagle. Tellingly, it is from Mercedes’s point of view that this creature is first seen—“My eagle swoops into view” (p1)—but it is Kate who recalls this eagle in her trauma, imagining her “arms growing wings. Wings of heavy metal … Too frail to fly” (p17). Throughout her incarceration, Kate grapples for symbols such as this, coding them into her being. This is her means to survive amidst the nightmare of her life (p50):
Aaaagh. I vomit. I shake./I shake and I sprout feathers. I take off and soar: a wedge-tailed eagle. I leave this horror behind.
There is a visceral empathy embedded deep in this, as there is through all of the work. Usually, it stems from Desi’s ignorance as a narrator. When Desi writes “This page fell out and I can’t figure out where it goes” (p114), or “I wish Kate had been a Virgo because then I’d have some chance of following her schema” (p20), it is heartbreaking—Kate is literally silenced by Desi’s lack of knowledge or understanding, symbolic of how lesbians throughout history have been silenced by a lack of knowledge or understanding on a much larger scale. But here in particular, the empathy for Kate is born out of a sense of injustice to her situation, and a sympathy to her desperate wish for escapism.
The eagle resounds both forward and behind in the text, tethered to Kate’s “Codex psapphistra” (p148): Desi writes, “She describes a range of animals from a lesbian-centric point of view. She is creating a universe in which lesbian symbols lie at the centre” (p148). Kate—by her Greek name, Ekaterina—moors herself to her Greek history. Because of this, Dark Matters bleeds with heavy Greek interplay. Kate’s obsession with the Muses and with Psappha may unmoor a reader not well-versed in this history. However, as Kate is herself unmoored, this decision is deliberate; the impact is viscerally sympathetic, rather than alienating.
Similarly, Kate, her physical and emotional boundaries under assault, wars between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ attitudes to her situation—the micro, an intrinsic desperation for herself alone, and the macro, a selfless agony for the thousands of lesbians like her. On a personal level, she writes: “There I am, still strapped in, covered by their hate. I cry and cry” (p51)—on a societal level, she writes: “I cry. I cry for all. For all the women. For all the lesbians” (p52). For Kate, this is another means of survival—she reminds herself of the bigger picture in order to stay strong and silent, refusing to give information to her abductors, knowing how much is at stake. She is painfully aware of how much her incarceration represents (pp109-112):
The boundaries between my flesh and theirs. They have violated those boundaries. They have violated me. And through me, as they know, they are symbolically violating every other lesbian on this planet … Lines of self. Lines of the other. They rip through the lines.
Inevitably, little by little, her resolve crumbles, her psyche under attack by these invasions. Lines relating to her torture, for example, that her captors “Took [her] hands and strapped [her] to the … I cannot call it a bed” (p47, author’s ellipses), are later matched by lines recalling her time in Greece before she was incarcerated, such as “for this narrow space could not be called a bed” (p59). This second line is provided as Kate settles down with a foreign paramour. The striking similarities in expression and language between these quotes evidence how the horrors of Kate’s incarceration have contaminated her memory. The reader sees her trauma, achingly, begin to corrupt her experience of significant lesbian encounters through life, buckling her sense of lesbian identity.
To match how the boundaries of Kate’s identity are compromised and attacked, her sense of self unmoored, Hawthorne provides a ‘shredded’ story. Desi struggles to piece together the narrative—“What we have left are fragments” (p3); “It’s a giant jigsaw” (p35)—just as Kate struggles to piece together a psychic defence—“I forget who I was, who I might have been” (p169); “I have died and died and died” (p173). This wounded sense of self and community is what makes the work so unforgettable.
In a rare moment of awareness from Desi, she writes: “Dark matter is almost imperceptible. Invisible and yet it takes up space. Like a lesbian in a room full of people” (p160). Hawthorne depicts a lesbian under siege, her personhood, psychic, and personal boundaries all compromised by systems which cannot accept her. Personally, she is attacked by abduction and assault. Societally, she is diminished through prejudice and inequality. The resulting text is something profoundly important. Dark Matters is a war-cry. It is a declaration of personhood and reclamation of identity from the traumas induced by these dark histories.
MEL O’CONNOR is a Professional and Creative Writing graduate from Deakin University. Her experience is in communications and administration. She is working on her novella, a literary fiction about the animal rights scene.
November 7, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Light Borrowers: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2018
Foreword by Isabelle Li
Brio Books
ISBN: 9781925589627
Review by BEEJAY SILCOX
“In the beginning, it was just us and the words,” writes University of Technology Sydney (UTS) student –and writer – EM Tasker. “We sang them into being, and they existed only in our minds. They reproduced by passing from the lips of one person to the ears of another. But that meant they could only reproduce when people gathered. That was until Writing joined the relationship. The resulting ménage à trois was wildly successful.” (171)
For 32 years, UTS has been celebrating the fruits of that lexical love triangle by publishing an anthology of work penned by its Creative Writing students. This year’s lovingly-assembled edition, Light Borrowers, borrows its title from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Rival’, and with it the tension ever-present in Plath’s poetry – the glorious tension between beauty and annihilation.
As a reader, opening an anthology is akin to entering a room of strangers; we arrive hopeful but nervous, ears pricked for conversation, camaraderie and conflict. How (and how well) we are welcomed is largely dependent on our hosts, on how well we are introduced to the crowd. In Light Borrowers, UTS alumna, author and translator Isabelle Li greets us warmly at the door with the key to a live and lively room. There is one line, she argues in her foreword, that will unlock the anthology; it is waiting for us near its midpoint, in a poem by Shoshana Gottlieb: “The In Between / pockets of time that happen as we wait for / the moments we beg to define us.” (163)
Light Borrowers is anchored in this ‘In Between’. Across a range of genres, from memoir to flash (one of its most memorable contributions by Qing Ming Je is a single, knife-edged sentence), each of its 28 pieces inhabit the liminal spaces that separate, connect and define us. Between childhood and adulthood; believing and knowing; memory and forgetting; remembered pasts and imagined futures; fable and fact. Between, as Gottlieb describes, “the Things We Do and the Things That Happen To Us.” (164)
In Sydney Khoo’s ‘I’m (Not) Lovin’ It’ we slip between the sheets, as they wrestle with sexual labels and expectations that simply do not fit: “Wearing those labels felt like sleeping in a bed that wasn’t mine,” they write. “As comfortable as the mattress was, and as clean as the sheets were, I woke up irritable, unrested.”(38) Khoo’s piece is a confident love story – a self-love story – which begins when they ingeniously convince their conservative mother to buy them a sex toy.
In Sally Breen’s ‘The Garden’ we slip between the senses to let “vivid colours draw vivid memories.” In it, a woman remembers versions of her grandfather’s garden and the versions of herself that wandered it. It’s a piece heady with synesthetic nostalgia, brilliantly coloured in “Kodachrome hues”:
“And all that remains is this orchard. Heirloom apples, small and crisp. I twist an apple, a revolution. And when it snaps the branch flicks back. Fruit fits snugly in my hand. It is this orchard that my grandmother adored. Blue Mountains. These blue days of sadness.” (28)
And in Amy Shapiro’s ‘Scheherazade’ we slip between forms as she takes the cage of a theatre script and shakes the bars to produce something else entirely – a dark vision of a mechanised future that explores that unfathomable space between consciousness and algorithm. “Suffering isn’t regression,” (55) Shapiro’s human protagonist tells her android interrogator. How might he believe her?
But it is the space between worlds – the space between cultures, traditions, histories and geographies – that beckons most insistently in Light Borrowers. “My people are the invisible fatalities / The footnotes of / Your people’s / History,” (209) laments Christine Afoa, of her Samoan heritage in ‘My People’ – a poem fearless, furious and proud.
“There is no X to mark my spot on this land,” writes Kiwi Shana Chandra, as she grapples with how conspicuously inconspicuous she feels visiting India:
“I know that if I enter this crowd, its surge will envelop me and I will be undetectable. I remember how scared I was at this thought when I first got off the plane in India, annoyed at all the brown faces, identical to mine. I am so comfortable wearing my difference in New Zealand and Australia that here I feel different, although I look the same as everyone else.” (190)
Worlds erased and escaped, lost and left, conjured and confining – Light Borrowers is anchored in the sensory details that bring worlds to life: the slow, night-time clacking of a basket of live snails; a lipstick kiss on a pillowslip; a sweaty city of “sleep deprived malcontents wearing badly fitting underpants”; a witty graffiti retort. “They zoom past the train line,” writes Jack Cameron Stanton, “and he sees the famous scrawl: GOD HATES HOMMOS, in black spray paint, with a neater, more curvaceous response spread beneath it in purple: BUT DOES HE LIKE TABOULI?” (83)
Those worlds are as individual as their authors; “inconsolably human” to borrow a phrase from Stanton. The triumph of Light Borrowers is that it has been constructed in, by and for, a diverse Australia, and it shows. This is an anthology that cares about the differences within Asian-Australian communities, not just between them. As Khoo writes: “Growing up as a second-generation Chinese Australian, I was constantly learning that the norm was actually just my norm.” (35) We are all living in our own, individual between place, Light Borrowers argues. Between the people we are, and the people we wish to be. Between ourselves and the world.
And yes, Light Borrowers is student work – the product of exuberance, ambition, earnestness and generosity. Every piece carrying the coiled energy of a seed, the shape of the author to come.
When people write of writing talent, there’s a tendency to equate youth with promise. We make list after list of bright young things to watch, and use ‘young’ as a synonym for ‘new’. Light Borrowers offers a magnificent rejoinder in the work of Echo Qin He, a woman determined to escape her inheritance of silence:
“I am in my 50s now. I don’t want to regret on my deathbed that I never gave it a go. It has taken me a long time. I have begun writing and my muscles are getting stronger day by day. Elements that used to be hard previously, that I didn’t know how to write about, now come more easily.” (160)
As a new migrant to Australia, writing – even reading – fiction felt like a luxury Echo Qin He could not afford, “making a living had to come first”. We can’t afford to lose or alienate voices like hers; new, urgent and carrying a lifetime – generations – of untold stories. We need more spaces like the UTS anthology, spaces that make room for new writers as they navigate that vital exploratory, playful space between searching for, and finding, their voice. A place where they can borrow a little light.
BEEJAY SILCOX came to writing circuitously; after narrowly escaping a life in the law, she has worked as a criminologist, agony-aunt, strategic policy boffin, and teacher of Americans. It is better for everyone that she now works on her own, as a literary critic and cultural commentator. Her award-winning short fiction has been published internationally, and recently anthologized in Best Australian Stories and Meanjin A-Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now. Incurably peripatetic, Beejay is currently based in Cairo, where she writes from a century-old building in the middle of an island, in the middle of the Nile.