Jenny Hedley reviews Icaros by Tamryn Bennett

August 22, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Icaros

by Tamryn Bennett

Vagabond Press

ISBN 978-1-925735-56-7

Reviewed by JENNY HEDLEY

The use of medicinal plants or herbs originates from Indigenous knowledge systems which predate colonisation by thousands, or in the case of Aboriginal pharmacopeia, tens of thousands of years. Phytotherapy, a science-based medical practice first described by French physician Henri Leclerc in 1913, uses plant-derived medicines for prevention and treatment of ailments. Today, industrial pharma hacks plants’ intrinsic biotechnologies for maximum profit, producing pills and potions engineered to ease mental and physical maladies. What has been overlooked by the dollars that be (aka extractive capitalism) is the use of traditional plant medicines for diseases of spirit.

Tamryn Bennett’s Icaros sings into that supernatural vegetal space of mystification, ritual and holistic therapy. ‘Icaro’ comes from the Quichua verb ikaray: ‘to blow smoke for healing’. Icaros are traditionally sung by curanderx or shamans during plant ceremonies which originated in the Amazon basin.

Medicine songs
ancient as jungle
we’re passengers of the plant,
the dying, deaf and addicted. (32)

Not to be approached lightly, ayahuasca ceremonies demand discipline, respect, and abstinence from sex, drugs, alcohol, salt, sugar and some animal products. Set, setting and intention must be considered.

Wrapped in net
Ayanmanan asks your intention
           holds a fuming stone
           and a basket of shadow.

                 chhhh chhhhh chhhh
                 chhhh chhhhh chhhh

Follow the chakapa
           rattle of ritual
Drink the vines to know
the pattern of all things. (32)

During ceremony, the Banisteriopsis caapi vine interacts with the leaves of the Psychotria viridis shrub to produce beta-carbolines that restrict the ability of a person’s monoamine oxidase enzyme to degrade the N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) present in the sacred vine. The DMT acts on the central nervous system, allowing people to access a state of nonduality or oneness.

This is where amnesia and healing
           begin, along the worn path
           a wreath of hedera helix. (22)

Bennett’s spirit songs carry us into this alternate reality, performing a pas de trois between English, Spanish and verdant language where plants speak and we listen. In Covert Plants, Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson define ‘plant writing’ as being receptive ‘to sentience, sapience, and forms of life that are distinctly botanical’ [1].

This Is Your Mind On Plants author Michael Pollan writes, ‘Psychedelic compounds can promote experiences of awe and mystical connection that nurture the spiritual impulse of human beings’ [2]. Clifford Pickover, who received his PhD from the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, hypothesises that ‘DMT in the pineal glands of biblical prophets gave God to humanity and let ordinary humans perceive parallel universes’ [3].

If philosopher Simone Weil were inspired by herbaceous delights and ‘[f]our billion years of infinite / combinations’ (21), rather than the Christian God, perhaps these are the aphorisms that would flow:

How do you want to die?
That’s how you must live.

           What are the seeds in your heart?
           That’s the tree you will become. (17)

She might channel this ‘voice from the other world’ that ‘tells us to taste / the deities of dirt’ (45), to ‘remember where you hid the key’ (79):

when the world gets too heavy
lay yourself down
be still a hundred years

let go of the paper lives,
what could you carry
all these seasons anyway?

breath, sun, rain…
none are ours to keep
leaves are lessons of release (29)

Illuminated by artist Jacqueline Cavallaro’s otherworldly paper-based collage, compressed from three dimensions into two, Icaros extends the collaboration between poet and visual artist as exhibited in Bennett’s debut phosphene, published via Rabbit Poetry Journal’s Rabbit Poet Series in 2016. In both volumes, the visual amalgamation of figurative fine art with zoological and botanical sketches decentres the human, imbuing the vegetal with eyes that see. These uncanny, surrealist compositions of art and text, whose title-page glyphs suggest a relationship between story and stardust, or perhaps the origin of language, invite the reader to open themselves to ancient ways of knowing. Bennett presents a reality where everything living derives from the cellular—a ‘fistful of galaxy reassembled on shore’ (19): it is all a matter of scale or time.

In the introduction to phosphene, Bennett describes her poems as ‘fragmented elegies’ and ‘prayers for the wind, for buried cities, for the invisible and the sacrifice’ [4]. She takes us with her as ‘at the temple of letters’ (4) she ascends ‘two thousand stone steps / into cloud’ (6). Where her debut poetry collection invites a collaboration with her ‘plant symphony’ project co-artist Guillermo Batiz, whose Spanish translations precede, follow or are interwoven with Bennett’s, Spanish seeps seamlessly into her sophomore collection. Each method lends a sonorous quality to the text: in phosphene it presentiments, echoes or proffers a call and response; in Icaros, bi-linguistics perform alongside onomatopoeia, the hissing of fire, the incantation of song, a rattle’s percussive hiss.

In Icaros, Red Room Poetry’s artistic director, Bennett, who received her PhD in literature from the University of New South Wales, remembers the women who were burned at the stake, for those whose ‘Plant knowledge comes with a price, / hide it or be set ablaze’ (40). She acknowledges the creep of colonisation, ‘Languages leaving, / little extinctions in the dunes’ (68). She walks us through preparations for ceremony—‘we pick sage by barbed wires / weed plastic bags from prickly pear’ (48)—and into ritual itself:

Palo santo on the abdomen
to cut the cords of attachments,
for the ones that left
and children who were not.
Collect kindling to reawaken. (49)

I am a little bit obsessed with the form of Icaros. Where phosphene presents four poems which sing, reverberate and refrain across a number of pages, Icaros divides a series of poems into four sections: Marrow, Ritual, Remember and Matter. While each section’s ten to seventeen poems are titled in the contents, the titles emerge directly from the text and are indicated in each poem’s body by bolded font. This integrated technique permits an uninterrupted reading of each section as if listening to a chant or Benedictine chorus, creating a sensation of ongoingness evocative of oral storytelling, where shadow and light play tricks of perception around flickering fire.

In Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson argues that artful writing demands that the writer’s breath be evident in the cadences of lines; in rhythms, breaks and beats shaped together as if sung; in a pulse echoing that of the writer’s body [5]. Slow down, is Bennett’s injunction. Breathe. Bennett’s phosphene and Icaros withdraw me from the hurried vacuum of life, an act of self-care.

Bennett’s writing arrests me, disinters the salty banks memories, transposing me to the late 1980s (I am lying on the grass at recess, staring up at light dazzled through spring’s lush foliage as my friend traces her hand along the undulating groves of a tree’s trunk, thanking it for shade). To the ensuing Women Who Run with the Wolves era that inspired our mothers’ escape to Esalen for wild women dances and shamanic healing, leaving us to our SARK workbooks. A temporal dislocation where sage lingers post-smudge, where bears and rattlesnakes portend, where butterflies are saved and named only to be surrendered to earth.

Lie on trunks of drowned forest
sharing how the heart trips and flies open.
What we leave of ourselves
for the raptors (27)

Winterson assigns to the poet the job of healing the breakdown between language and the unlanguageable. She notes that art as an ‘imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily world’, challenging our notion of self (15). We construct our own versions of reality every day, turning to faster news cycles and social media echo chambers, becoming stuck in the mire of unquestioned feedback loops. Bennett, who believes that ‘poetry enables us to shape sounds and symbols that tie us together in the uncertainty [of] our shared existence’ cautions against trading ancient wisdom for extractive capitalism [6]:

and rivers damned
to sew the desert
in straight lines
and milk it for lattes

For the mountains
clear cut
to make toilet paper,
Masonite
and pizza coupons

For ancestors, animals,
panacea and songs…
erased (69)

Here Bennett returns us to our roots—‘in every culture a cosmic tree’ (71) — to our stellar origins — ‘Past the waves we are particle, equations of universe’ (81)—to our interconnectedness—‘if we could remember how / we’d bow our heads, trace cords / to the mothers we were cut from’ (56)—and asks, ‘How many symbols will we need / before we trust the currents?’ (87). Icaros and its predecessor phosphene are an injunction to the cycles of nature, the alchemy of ritual and the rhythms of remembering along an axis of deep time.
 
 
Notes

Brits, Baylee, and Prudence Gibson. Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World, Punctum Books, 2018.
Pollan, Michael. This is Your Mind On Plants: Opium—Caffiene—Mescaline. Allen Lane, 2021.
Brown, David Jay. Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Bennett, Tamryn. phosphene. Rabbit Poetry Journal as part of the Rabbit Poets Series, 2016.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. Vintage International, 1997.
Bennett, Tamryn. ‘Outside the Lines’. Sydney Review of Books, 10 May 2021. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/outside-the-lines/
 
 
JENNY HEDLEY is a neurodivergent writer, PhD student and Writeability mentor whose work appears in Archer, Cordite, Crawlspace, Diagram, Mascara, Overland, Rabbit, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Verity La, Westerly, and the anthologies Admissions: Voices in Mental Health and Verge. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. Website: jennyhedley.github.io/

Gurmeet Kaur reviews The Dancer by Evelyn Juers

August 21, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Dancer

by Evelyn Juers

Giramondo

Reviewed by GURMEET KAUR

The Dancer is an unusual biography. Dedicated to the subject, it is written ‘for’ rather than about Phillipa Cullen. The author’s close relationship with Cullen determines the biographer’s intentions — Juers and Cullen were university friends and remained in touch until she unexpectedly died at the age of 25. The book is a memorial, an extended eulogy and an archival object that solidifies Cullen’s legacy in Australian experimental dance history. It is also a poetic narrative that documents the events, ideas and people orbiting around Cullen in 1960s and 1970s Australia.

On biography, Hermione Lee writes that it’s ‘like lives…made up of contested objects – relics, testimonies, versions, correspondences, the unverifiable’. Juers spends years researching Cullen’s life, starting with a single folder of letters that extended into an archive taking up ‘a whole filing cabinet, large storage containers, much of my computer desktop and the top of my desk (7)’. The result is an extensive narrative totalling 550 pages, made up of first-person accounts detailing Cullen’s life through letters, interviews, reviews and diary entries. These ‘relics’ help Juers to animate Cullen’s voice and ‘let her speak for herself as much as possible (6)’, while the author’s research places Cullen in a broader history of colonialisation and global travel. Juers balances this tension between letting ‘contested objects’ speak for themselves and using historical research to contextualise and problematise the subject. However, in some places, the writing also reproduces the inequities of the time.

Born in Melbourne in 1950, Cullen enrolled in dance school at an early age, before moving to Sydney as a young child where she remained. She attended University of Sydney, studied Anthropology, English, Italian and Philosophy and taught dance on the lawn of the university quadrangle. Cullen experimented with dance and electronics in this early digital era with theremins, an electronic instrument that played music by controlling the electromagnetic field around the instrument rather than any direct contact. Cullen choreographed performances with theremins controlled by the dancers’ movement to generate music. She applied for funding from the newly formed Australia Council in 1973 and travelled to UK, Germany, Netherlands, Ghana, Nepal and India to refine her practice. On her return to Australia in 1974, she was invited by cultural institutions across Australia to perform but felt ‘frustrated by Australia’s cultural cringe and lack of responsiveness to her own work’ (478). In April 1975, Cullen returned to India but quickly became sick and died within months of being in Kodiakanal, India.

Divided into four sections, The Dancer begins with Cullen’s ancestral history. Spanning as far back as 14th century, Juers maps Cullen’s origins in Leicestershire, London and Cornwall in England and Kilkenny in Ireland, threading tenuous connections to ancestors who moved with the British empire to India, Tobago, Jamaica, and more. In Australia, they arrived as ‘free settlers’, playing an active part in the colonial project:

By the early twentieth century the Aboriginal population south of Sydney had diminished to thirty survivors. Their descendants preserve their culture, tell their stories and mourn those who were killed, who died of disease, or who were dispossessed in the frontier wars between the Indigenous people and the newcomers (29).

Decades before Cullen is born, this is the horrific history of slavery, genocide and dispossession on lands her ancestors ‘settled and this was the history – Aboriginal and colonial – in which they and others of their family played a part (34)’. This truth-telling however raises more questions than it answers, particularly in the use of colonial language. Examples like above are counteracted by pages of colonial history written from the oppressor’s view:

Some have argued that in his plan to civilise Aboriginal people, Macquarie is well intentioned. He had a scheme. Ceremoniously he presented tribal chiefs with engraved breastplates. At Parramatta he established a Native School. Some children came voluntarily while others were abducted and forcibly taken there. People started hiding their children for fear of having them stolen. He held a series of Native Conferences, where he served roast beef and ale and let the chiefs sit on chairs. When Aboriginal people visited him, he was a genial host. To those who were most friendly and useful, he gave gifts, including land, livestock and boats (33).

Perhaps Juers’s preference here is to present a historical account authenticated by voices of its time, leading her to borrow language from primary archival materials. But placed against colonial brutality, such summaries are jarring to read, especially when the minimising, bureaucratic and colonial language is not sufficiently contextualised, simply taken from the past and placed into the present. For instance, could the word ‘civilised’ and ‘native’ have been in quotation marks so that it is clear it belongs in the past? Could the idea of ‘gifts’ have been further analysed through the explanation of terra nullius, knowing that the land Macquarie ‘gifted’ was stolen? Could the ‘friendly and useful’ behaviour have been further explained, perhaps as a protective mechanism against a belligerent colonial campaign of genocide? There are repeated uses of words like ‘explorer’, ‘expedition’, and land ‘grants’ across this section, all of which centre the perspective of the coloniser without additional interrogation.

This reproduces colonial violence, recentering the colonial narrative, and the absence of Aboriginal voices (historical and contemporary) relegates First Nations people to a mythic past. Even though Juers later writes that ‘we now regard those settlers’ histories through a different lens, in which the colonists’ gains were the Aboriginal people’s tragic losses (53)’, it does not negate for the surprising amount of space given to colonial voices through which First Nations history is mediated. The link between Cullen’s story as a dancer and her ancestral past feels arbitrary at times; Juers’s desire to include this genealogical research is possibly weighted here with the responsibility to write ‘for’ Cullen rather than the contemporary reader.

Pre-empting this critique, Juers states in the prologue that her aim is to take ‘a larger perspective, which allows intrinsic and extrinsic material, the wondrous and the mundane, the directions and the digressions, to determine the shape of this biographical narrative (8).’ This expansive approach does lead to some interesting research which places Cullen in the wider post-colonial context. Cullen ‘felt a strong affinity with Eastern forms of dance (235)’ and was drawn to learn about ancient practices, to ground the development of her new ideas. In an era of New Age spiritualism, the hippie trail, and the founding of self-determining nations, Cullen travelled to the township of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1968 by the French spiritualist Mirra Alfassa, Auroville is dedicated to the teachings of the Indian spiritual guru Sri Aurobindo and was founded as a place to practice his philosophy, quickly becoming a ‘colony of foreigners. A postcolonial extension of the age-old colonial civilising mission (423)’, Juers’s historical research in this part holds westerners to account, highlighting their role in perpetuating colonial structures even today as Auroville ‘relies largely on Tamil labour and still adheres to colonial hierarchies (424)’. Devoid of local cultural practices, the Auroville project participated in historical and political amnesia, its early promotional material offering it as ‘a physical space wherein individuals could leave both the past and the present behind (423)’ at a time when the Indian Civil Rights movement was successful in ejecting Britain and the nation was coming to terms with its political self-determination.

This setting situates the reader in understanding why Cullen and her contemporaries like Viidikas, Leves and others gravitated to India in places like Auroville and later Kodaikanal (‘a small town created in the 1840s by American missionaries (514)’) in South India, rather than other places in the subcontinent. This was a politically conscious time around the world and especially in India in the aftermath of Partition and the Bangladesh Liberation War. It makes sense that westerners seeking spiritual guidance in post-colonial India ended up in sheltered ashrams (often designed with them in mind like the one in Auroville) and perhaps also why Cullen wanted to return to Auroville to better understand ‘an enlightened movement groping for holistic reality (344)’.

While Juers’s primary materials raises questions about discriminatory attitudes of the time, the writer attempts to balance this mostly with historical research to frame the past. But in sections when Juers strips way both archives and research and leans into memoir, the writing becomes most moving. Towards the end of The Dancer, Juers describes Phillipa Cullen’s life as ‘a scattering. A gathering. A ballet. Pain. Body twists, leg extensions, pulling by arms, slow rolls, improvisations, hip socket rotation, inhale and exhale, rise and fall (532).’

In this final section, Juers’s grief for her lost friend is palpable as she asks ‘at dusk, before she lost consciousness, what came to the fore? A summoning of strength? A parade? (532)’, her syntax becoming fragmented, arranged in a heavy block, before drifting again on white page. Although The Dancer provoked discomfort in its complicated portrayal of colonial and post-colonial histories, Juers’s biography is most successful when it explores her personal response to the tragic death of Phillipa Cullen.

GURMEET KAUR is a critic and poet living on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Country. Her work has appeared in Ambit, Cordite, Sydney Review of Books, Peril, Kill Your Darlings, The Victorian Writer, and elsewhere. She is currently one of KYD‘s 2023 New Critics.

Theodora Galanis reviews Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

August 12, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Praiseworthy

by Alexis Wright

ISBN 9781922725325

Giramondo

Reviewed by THEODORA GALANIS
 
 
 
‘Listen!’ cries an oracle. ‘Look proper way. Carefully. See detail, if you want to see properly.’ (p.368).

This instruction arrives almost halfway through Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, opening the chapter titled, ‘Goddess of Scales’.

Before I had reached this page, I was having doubts about writing this review. Praiseworthy is a text that rightfully challenges the plucky critic who thinks they can take it on in a thousand words. One of the novel’s narrators pre-empts my concern: why risk sounding like ‘a little academic who thought he knew it all’? (p.368).

The call to ‘listen’ and ‘see detail’, however, felt like a generous invitation. It prompted to me think about how I had been reading this novel – or rather, how the novel had been asking to be read.

Following the oracle’s imperative, this review is in part a reflection on what Praiseworthy has to tell us about a slow reading practice and why it matters.

***

Praiseworthy is set in a fictional town of the same name somewhere in dust storm smothered country up in the north of Australia. This story begins ‘once upon a’ good for some and bad for others time: the dreaded present of the Anthropocene, of global warming and global pandemic, of hate speech and social media, of Intervention violence and Closing the Gap talk.

Here, under the ‘sulky’ orange haze, we meet the Steel family. The father, Cause Man, is a pain in the ‘ass’ entrepreneur who is terrified about global warming. He dreams up a plan to make an international fossil-fuel-free transport conglomerate fuelled off the backs of feral donkeys. His wife, Dance, thinks this is a load of bulldust. She’s a sensible woman who is better off spending her time flitter fluttering with the moths and butterflies than tidying up after his mess. They have two children, the aspiring boxer and in-love eldest son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, and his younger ratbag brother, Tommyhawk.

Praiseworthy stages the interconnected journeys of these characters as they each embark on a quest of sorts: Cause is looking for the perfect platinum donkey to be the ‘mask-head’ of his company, Dance traces her ancestral links to China, Tommyhawk begs for a one-way ticket to Canberra, and Aboriginal Sovereignty looks for, well, maybe somewhere to offer up his love.

Across the breadth of her oeuvre, including titles like Plains of Promise (1997) and The Swan Book (2014), Wright demonstrates a commitment to exploring what it is to write an ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the imagination’. In her essay ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, she describes this as:

Just such a story as we might tell in our story place. Something to grow the land perhaps. Or, to visit the future.

In Praiseworthy, questions surrounding sovereignty of the imagination are focalised through the Steel family’s eldest son. We learn early on that he commits suicide by walking into the sea. This event embroils the people of Praiseworthy in a search of their own. Variously motivated, all kinds of folk from ghostly-looking fishermen to pandanus-fanning power ladies to fanatical church goers sift through the sand in search of his life. Even the anthropologist-cum-copper called Maximum Security combs the beach for evidence.

Aboriginal Sovereignty’s haunted presence is the ‘mystery death thing’ that percolates through the novel(p.368). Held in the arms of the ‘giant sea lady’, his story is always filtered through her tidal movements which wash in and out of narrative focus. Each time I felt myself sucked away from the drought-stricken dust country and pulled into the lap of the sea, I returned to the question of his absence a little differently. Why did he die? Or, did he really die?

***

The epic size of Praiseworthy poses a direct challenge to the tik-tocking attention spans of iPhone-loving brains like Tommyhawk’s. The writing demands sustained focus on a sentence as it sprawls over four, five, six lines. The reader is asked to consider a single image or colour for minutes on end, like the meditation on the colour grey that spans some seventeen pages.

As is characteristic of Wright’s rhythm, such wondrously long passages are often punctuated with an exclamation. My favourites include, ‘So!’, ‘Well!’, ‘But!’, ‘Sovereignty!’, ‘Bang!’ ‘Yep!’, ‘Whatever!’, ‘Sea!’(pp.290, 301, 307, 317, 334). These percussive beats interrupt the hypnotic effect of the sounds that preceded it, offering a moment to pause and reflect. Or to switch gears and wake up a bit. It almost feels like a little clip around the ears: Hey! You still listening?

Oracles are called to ‘speak up’ at the beginning of each chapter, marking the oral storytelling traditions which have been fused into Wright’s earlier takes on the epic form (p.164). The multiple narrators each shape the story with their own inflections and points of emphasis. There is no universalising voice in Praiseworthy. But, how could there be? These oracles are attempting to fathom ‘real quests of importance’ about ‘the interconnectedness of survival simultaneously occurring throughout the cherished lands of traditional country’(p.96). In a story of this size, a single perspective will simply not suffice. A narrator remarks:

“How could one person become so worthy of being – the epic? Of being that special? Were the storytellers too lazy these days to look further into the human abyss, or too unimaginative to be bothered to create a more diverse catalogue of stories?”(p.25)

It is this ambition – to tune in to the several overlapping, and sometimes contradictory, stories of country – that Praiseworthy strives towards. Cause Man Steel obsessively concerns himself with problems on a planetary scale (so much so that he picks up the nicknames ‘Planet’ and ‘Global Warming’). In contrast, it is Dance who often brings the focus back to the smaller details. As moth woman, the ‘moth-er’, she has gift for tuning into the inaudible frequencies of insect life. She listens to ‘two ants arguing for hours over a crumb of bread’ and a ‘far-off moth or butterfly splashing into the ocean’. Elsewhere, she is described ‘reading the unfathomable or innumerable messages held in the billions of microscopic scales stacked like sets of roof tiles on the wings of the moth’. The use of the word ‘scale’ here is most intriguing, for its relation to ideas of measurement, weight, size, shifts, balance, proportion, and too of skin, reptilian, insect and piscine.

The sliding movement between scales of stories is something Wright deftly handles in Praiseworthy. The locus of the narrative continually shifts from the inaudible and invisible stories, the hidden-beneath-your-shoe stories or the hiding-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea stories, to the grand master stories, the atmospheric stories, the old as time stories. Take this sentence, for example, as a small instantiation of the kind of scaling effect that characterises the broader narrative form:

Country always tells its people that there are endless ways of reading its world, depending on whether you are a moth, a butterfly, a dragonfly, a mountain chain, the sea, a river, moon, or stars, or the atmosphere itself.(p535)

From the tiny to the cosmic, the elements are held together in mutual significance to the epic story of country.

The interplay between local and planetary forces is a source of great energy in the text. There is an emphasis on the importance of the local, and yet an attention to what occurs elsewhere. Epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter reflect this planetary focus, with quotes drawn from the Waanyi Dictionary to Jorge Luis Borges to former Hong Kong politician, Alvin Yeung. These wide-reaching references, alongside others scattered throughout the prose, place Wright’s work within global circuits and planetary frames.

***

Against the scarcity logic defining so much talk about the Anthropocene, in Praiseworthy Wright offers stylistic abundance in such a way that could be characterised as, quoting the novel, ‘over-imagined and overgrown’(p.316). The sheer poetic density is a defiant protest against a contemporary compulsion toward speed, minimalism, and efficiency.

Praiseworthy swirls over itself again and again. In the first chapter, we are introduced to many of the narrative strands that Wright picks up on at later stages – albeit with a different voice, from a different vantage point. As if whirling through an oceanic gyre or a cyclonic wind current, readers are repeatedly drawn back into almost-familiar scenes to re-witness characters in the ongoing negotiation of life in and beyond the hazy town.

Despite its energetic rhythms, in moments it can feel as if you’re moving slowly through Praiseworthy. It really did take me quite some time to read this book. That’s not just because it’s big – though, mind you, everyone who’s seen me carrying it around has commented on its size (Bloody hell! That’s a doorstopper, said the bus driver yesterday).
I think the effect of moving slowly is kind of the point. The wise ‘extinction-less’ elders explain the significance of this:

With old-world thinking, you have to reach down into the depths of time to raise it to the surface and compete with the faster-than-thought new world twaddle dazzle skimming across the skin of the spirit. Well!(p.291)

Old-world thinking doesn’t happen in a jiffy. And in Praiseworthy this is not simply advocated through certain voices but materialised at the level of form: the long sentences, the swirling structure, the dense imagery and the number of pages all ask readers to slow down. To go back and look properly. To see detail. When moving carefully through Praiseworthy, we notice things that may otherwise pass us by in a blink.

In paying attention to the formal qualities of Praiseworthy, I have not intended to sidestep the politics of the novel. Rather, I posit slow reading as a practice that further attunes us to the complexities and violences of the colonial condition. Slow reading leaves space and time to do the deep, hard work of listening. Slow reading is a politics. Praiseworthy calls readers to take part.

Works Cited

Wright, Alexis. Praiseworthy. Giramondo, 2023.
—. ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, Indigenous Transnationalism: Essays on Carpentaria, edited by Lynda Ng, Giramondo Publishing Company, 2018, pp.217-232.

THEODORA GALANIS is a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide. She researches oceanic imaginaries in contemporary Australian literature. Her project forms part of the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative, ‘Between Indian and Pacific Oceans: Reframing Australian Literatures’.

Phyllis Perlstone reviews Cities by Petra White

August 3, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Cities

by Petra White

ISBN  978-1-925735-30-7

Vagabond

Reviewed by PHYLLIS PERLSTONE

Each time I have read Cities, I have felt more of the affect of the poetical language. Yet there is a way of looking at it as a whole. Given Petra White’s themes, I can’t help alluding to Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, also Sylvia Plath’s last book Ariel. White dives into the myths to find past definitions for past and present human roles : “Tell me what a mother is”.

The book begins with “Demeter’s Song”. Trying to define a mother within the ancient Greek myth of Hades – the god of the underworld who carries off Persephone, Demeter’s daughter to marry her. This suggests many sorts of darkness:

“Sing to me daughter
Upwards through the darkness”

White uses Persephone’s abduction to be perceived by her simply as growing away from the mother to adulthood. The grief of a human persona over a death (later in the poems) who is now a mother herself, links knowing death with the source of love. This is within the perception of a human mother. The early poems use the myth to personify similar human emotions.

In the second poem, “Demeter”, portraying someone who loves and loses, we are sent straight into the myth of Persephone, lost to Demeter in Hades. By casting the world into the ‘darkness’ of winter, when no crops grow and a depression then overcomes the world, White mirrors Demeter’s own loss. 

Whether the words evoking this depression suggest Demeter’s loss and provocation to revenge, or whether they suggest the response of grieving where she can neither act nor provide anything – as in the poem “Corn”– is not certain. Adrienne Rich.in her early work, Of Woman Born, argues that the “un-mothered mother” is neither able to guide nor, in the worst  cases, avoid being destructive. Demeter’s cry implies that she hears her inaction as criticised in a troll-like outburst. White incorporates  contemporary  nuances, as in the words, “I could hear them, / She lives through her daughter! / She is depressed! A monster !”

Demeter calls out, “Oh hideous love / that a mortal knows –/what you love you must lose./ But accept it? / Impossible as breath/under water”. White’s Demeter holds an ambivalent tone here. Her usual work can’t be done, it is just “Impossible as breath/ under water.” But that recognition of being like humans in their mortality, holds up the state of human imagination – the acceptance or not of death. 

These early poems are not broken into stanzas. They beautifully sustain short lines in one whole –give  recognition to mythical personifications – of human perceptions of their feelings. But the words in “Demeter” describing birth are heavy too  – “they heaved her on to my stomach/ like an anchor”, mirroring a mortal’s bodily awareness both physically and metaphorically. This is about being stopped in her singularity, taking the mother to a standstill – unable to be part of the rushing world around her. The lines are tempered though, and made ambivalent in tone again by the words about the baby : “When I held her I diminished/and grew all at once”. 

White’s Persephone has her definition  of her mother – “My mother is not human, cannot keep / her soul in quiet perspective” – implying that a human can. But here, Persephone is complaining of this wildness – its effect on her. The affect of the lines is also of hearing a protest that resists fate – echoes of  Dylan Thomas’ “Rage against the dying of the light”, or the mocking poetry of Sylvia Plath whose persona cannot relinquish what the poems satirise. In “The Applicant” and “Lady Lazarus”; a persona mocks herself in her suicide attempts – “I do it exceptionally well”.

Persephone tries to describe how she now thinks of this as a realisation that she is growing into adulthood. What that means. She is drawing away from her mother, but there is a conundrum in going into Hades to become a ‘shade’. “I had met myself as a shade. But how/ thrillingly alive I felt.” The poem ends with a surrender to her fate. Yet, she considers her new role as an honour: “Oh my dead, I will be your queen.” The next poem “Persephone at 40” tells of her still struggling with her and her mother’s goddess immortality. She has a deceptive disdain for Eurydice who dies after all. Also, she yearns to understand love, which she believes can only come with knowing death.

“I could love her more if I knew she would die.” Here the tone is of dramatic cynicism: “if I could hold / like flesh the empty air / and pray and cry and do all that”. The evocative language of knowing death is countered by “.. but in that other world /of streets and running children, / anonymous trees and painted cottages, / rivers that slump along ungrandly.” Persephone is caught between the status of ruling over the dead – and life in all its ordinary forms. There is, also, a compassion for the dead, their “faces folded up from animal sleep”. The lines beautifully contrast and balance the imagery. To this point White has drawn attention to the theme of mothering – its effect. “My mother tells me I am wild / but I am not motherless” attributes her behaviour to learning by example.

In the second section the theme of growing away from the mother is intensified. It deals with men and what to know about them – a satirical list alluding to traditional ways of deferring to men. There is also a poem, “Motherless”, and then poems about the death of the speaker’s mother – a human one now but now addressed as if she were a human ghost: “You knock like an accidental noise, and you / staring all through me / with curious half frightened eyes. / Now I have a daughter, I see how you loved me.” Here is another allusion to love and mothers and mothering. 

In Section III, what seems at first a bifurcation of theme, signalled by the book’s title, Cities, suggests ‘reality’ supplanting myth. The theme of reality becomes part of the second poem, “Marriage”. This section begins with “To London”. No longer diving into myth it starts with a real plane journey to a city; it concerns the new life separating her from her country and her mother. The mortal daughter, a mother herself, talks of mutual support between bread-winner husband and stay-at-home wife/mother. Fear of failure of the couple, as against the tiny baby’s happy responses, “waking to beam at the stewards/as if joy is default”.

Then, in “Journal in November”, in the light of what was reflected upon about myth in Section I, we read “Mortal love in the hands of lovers”. This is a telling insight of affective language : “a raucous mortgage, a ticking foetus”. The half-rhymes and onomatopoeia signal the sounds to beware of – the harsh sound of money’s need and the warning of time’s heart-beat of life. Finally, “We turn our heads to the most fantastic gods,/and pray, like lovers, for the small and large of our lives.” This suggests mortal love as only a romance, echoing Demeter’s “Oh hideous love that a mortal knows”.

This leads to “And I tell the psychoanalyst / I live in two worlds” – a swift, pared-down way to give a new character to what is introduced as mental ill-health. It evokes and echoes Persephone’s and Demeter’s worlds apart and the sense of an isolated mother’s life. Through this poetry the emotions easily dismissed as invisible or belittled are enlarged upon with great economy.

Within “Cities”, in the present as against the agrarian world of the ancient Greek myth, we begin to see other contrasts. “The homeless man’s camp is gone / hoovered up with the efficiency it lacked. / Night flutters around me in scraps? Car after car scrapes past.” “Journal in November” in numbered stanzas, brings up in a nuanced way a pared, precise account of the urban world, apologising for the narrator’s observations – the reasons for feeling the unmanageable view of “two- worlds”. The treatment here concerns another consequence – a quite ‘dark’ account of the mental sickness felt by the “traditional’ wife/mother in managing the “two worlds”. In stanza 5, Petra White’s narrator observes a wintry and un-mothered world: “In every head a piece of maniacal war, / a new shard of melting ice, / a bear cub climbing to its mother / up a perpendicular slope / pursued by a desperate drone / treefuls of images / we try to unstitch ourselves from”.

The lyrical disillusion and sometimes optimism of the rest of the poems (until the final “Home”) are laid out first in “Autumn Leaves” which recalls, in fantastical imagery, the beginning of love and the attempt to repair it. Finally, “a leaf caressed me/shyly as a hand turning away.” The softness of sad or dystopian observations is an effective part of Petra White’s beautiful word-managing.

The final poem  “Home” turns to a different myth, Odysseus and Penelope, falling back on another patriarchal theme. This time, a woman’s power is compromised; the power of the wife is subservient to that of her wandering husband.

Here we find the question of ‘home’ – what it is. Mother, father, child? What poetry does – what Petra White does – is far-ranging. In calling upon myth and reality, or present-day tropes of fears or contentment, lyricism is uppermost; it rescues the ‘dark’ things as well as portraying the better, simply by evoking them – lassoing them while they are moving in front of her, and capturing them in words to be seen and heard and read.

PHYLLIS PERLSTONE first an artist and experimental filmmaker, turning to poetry in 1992, studied poetry at the New School for Social Research, New York. Awards include the NSW Women Writers Poetry Prize 2004; second in the National Women Writers Poetry Prize 2005. She has published in many journals and anthologies. Her books are: You Chase After Your Likeness (2002), The Edge of Everything (2007), shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the  Premier’s Award NSW in 2008; Thick and Thin Lines (2012), The Bruise of Knowing(2014). But Now is published this year.

Anne Brewster reviews Daisy and Woolf by Michelle Cahill

August 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Daisy and Woolf

by Michelle Cahill

Hachette

Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER
 
 
 
 
 
Michelle Cahill’s debut novel Daisy & Woolf is accomplished and exhilarating. A re-reading of Virginia Woolf’s iconic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway, it excavates and reconstructs the literary worlding of a minor character, Daisy Simmons – the ‘dark, adorable’ Eurasian woman that Clarissa Dalloway’s longtime admirer, Peter Walsh, plans to marry. If you are thinking about the coupling of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre you are on the right track.

Daisy & Woolf relates the journeys of two Anglo-Indian women – Daisy, as she travels from Calcutta to London in the 1920s to meet her beloved Peter Walsh and her subsequent peregrinations in England and Europe – and Mina, the present-day writer recreating Daisy’s story in her own novel as she follows in Daisy’s footsteps, and as she re-traces the geographical trajectories and geopolitical underpinnings of Woolf’s writerly life.

The novel has been widely – and mostly positively – reviewed. Reviewers have acknowledged the significant cultural work that the novel undertakes in investigating the impact of race on women of colour. Marina Sano, for example, praises the novel’s ‘organic’ treatment of this issue (Books+Publishing) and Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen in the Sydney Morning Herald comments on the book’s challenge to the whiteness of the western canon, saying that there is something ‘wonderfully subversive’ about taking ‘a well-known Western text and flipping it inside out to reveal societal truths’ as Cahill does in Daisy & Woolf. 

An exception to these reviews is a review which simply fails to recognise the workings of race as they are laid bare within the poetic aesthetics of this powerful and complex novel. Attending to this omission is important, I suggest, as it indicates to us how resilient white power is in reproducing itself and how the operations of race remain invisible and unremarked in so many locations. It prompts me to respond by analysing the novel’s deconstructive aesthetics and how Cahill skilfully borrows from Woolf to rewrite the racialising narrative.

***

I was more than a little taken aback by the reviewer’s comment that the novel offers 

‘scant insight into the degree to which Daisy’s race (as opposed to her class or the scandal of her adultery) affects either her social standing or her eventual fate. The only time we are jolted into acknowledging the social and political repercussions of her Anglo-Indian heritage is when she is refused the designation “British subject” on her passport because her ‘skin colour is too dark.’
(Stubbings, 2022)

I was surprised that anyone could miss the novel’s forensic examination of the multiple ways both Daisy and Mina (and their families) have been racialised through the operations of the category Anglo-Indian/Eurasian. 

Mina, the young writer whose story becomes intertwined with Daisy’s reflects, in the first few pages of the novel, on Australia’s colonial history and the little-recorded history of the early migrants on the south coast of NSW where her family lived. She thinks about the Bengali lascars who, as indentured non-Indigenous labourers in the British colonies, represent ‘the invisible ink in the history of cross-cultural connections between India, China, Australia and England’ (6). The novel introduces us early to the tropes of migration/travel and ‘cross-cultural connections’ which comprise the overarching narrative framework of the novel and inform the character arcs of three central writerly female figures of the novel (Woolf, Daisy and Mina). Each of these women is cosmopolitan, cross-hatched by multiple cultural connections, translations and globalised histories. 

The canonical weight of Virginia Woolf and the privileged sure-footedness of her creation, Mrs Dalloway, serve as both inspiration and challenge to Mina and to Daisy. Cahill’s novel excavates Woolf’s familial connections (via Empire) with India and Sri Lanka/Ceylon. While Mina acknowledges, in the first pages of the novel, that ‘Woolf sought to question … empire’ (13), the novel proceeds to demonstrate the shortcomings of this enterprise. It problematizes Woolf’s representation of India and Anglo-Indians and demonstrates that, in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf ultimately could only ‘ke[ep] Daisy stunted’ (75), rendering her through the trace of stereotype. It would seem that Woolf did not have the imaginative resources – that is, an adequate political understanding and knowledge of the classed and raced history of empire – to create for Daisy any substantive ‘interior space’ (248) within the novel in spite of its experimental approach to literary realism. Ultimately, Mina insists, Daisy’s world was impenetrable to Woolf: ‘Daisy walks the streets of … postwar London in a way that Clarissa Dalloway cannot appreciate’ (177). Woolf’s apparent cosmopolitanism was marked by classed and raced elisions and disavowals which reproduced the hegemonies she aimed to challenge. 

This cultural blindness is understood by Mina as Woolf committing a discursive violence on the Anglo-Indian gendered subject, of whom Daisy is indexical. These discursive elisions become wider acts of gatekeeping by the literary industry; Mina reflects on the fact that Woolf and ‘the critics that came after her’ in effect ‘refus[e] to let Daisy in’ (69) or to give her a substantive presence within the narratives and the literary worldings that comprise the Anglophone canon. As Mina observes, ‘there’s barely a critic who is aware of, let alone interested in, poor Daisy Simmons’ (76). Indeed, in reality, even in progressive criticism Daisy has been mis-read, for example as ‘an English woman in India’ (Reed Hickman, 65). We can understand Daisy’s exclusion from canonical literary texts as being aligned with the exclusion of Anglo-Indian (along with other BIPOC) writers from the canon.

In her depiction of Daisy’s world, Mina, in a corrective move, decenters Mrs Dalloway’s hegemonic view of the ‘post-war London’ (177) to showcase the other aspects of that city and its denizens that Woolf’s novel largely omits – the many exiles, activists and impoverished people who call it home (however partially or temporarily). Cahill’s novel (like other literary work by BIPOC writers in other contexts) brings the spotlight to bear on the histories and bodies of minoritised people and their struggles against the hegemonic cultural and political histories we see enshrined in the literary canon and its aesthetics. 

***

However, this is not to argue that Mina or the novel, Daisy & Woolf, rejects Woolf and her work tout court. Mina avers an affiliation with Woolf as a feminist who fought against ‘the gender binary and patriarchy’ (175). She affirms that Woolf  ‘knew that women’s bodies are exploited and pursued’ (118). For example, she salutes Woolf for her efforts in testifying to the sexual abuse hidden beneath the niceties of upper-class English life, acknowledging Woolf’s courage in disclosing her sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brother (18).

Nor, despite its criticisms of Mrs Dalloway, does Daisy & Woolf advocate casting Woolf on the scrapheap of what we might call dead white women, or banishing the novel in disgrace. As well as mounting a sturdy and unflinching critique of Woolf’s classism and racism as they manifest in her representation of Daisy, Daisy & Woolf constitutes a homage to Woolf’s radical modernist aesthetics. Mina’s writing is an important and generative site of experimentation and subversion of literary realism (175). Mina admires Woolf’s interest in what she calls ‘the malleable nature of experience’ and ‘the trick of narrative’ (176). Further, Mina applauds Woolf’s efforts in forging a ‘new form’ (118), hailing her as ‘perhaps one of the first to attempt the novel-essay’ (176). 

Woolf’s aesthetics, I’d suggest, have deeply inspired Cahill’s own work. I’d argue, for example, that the novel-essay intersects with and informs Daisy & Woolf’s literary project. In reflecting on how to shape and fashion Daisy outside the strictures of the orientalising colonial gaze, Mina says:

Is it right to assume that a story alone can liberate Daisy of race and gender? Without an argument, without a history, Daisy’s voice is exotic or historical fiction [my emphasis]. (176)

Mina explains that the novel-essay – made up of historical fact and documentary material which in turn is combined with fictional speculation – is the genre which provides the means to ‘liberate’ Daisy. So can we identify the two constitutive elements of the novel-essay – argument and history – in Daisy & Woolf, and what literary work they undertake there?  

As I have argued, the novel documents the historical operations of white power, race and class and their impact on Daisy and Mina. When Daisy writes to Peter Walsh of the Anglo-Indians/Eurasians in India that ‘all our communities have been woken to the politics and economics of the times’ (27), she is summarising what we could, in effect, describe as one of the novel’s implicit ‘arguments’ about minoritised identities in the aftermath of colonisation, namely, that minoritised identities are shaped on multiple fronts by racialising forces beyond their control. Further, they are cognisant of these forces which many white constituencies disavow. In her portraiture of Daisy, Mina documents the historical context of the Anglo-Indians/Eurasians in both India and the UK. For example, Daisy’s decision to leave India is motivated not only by her desire to be with Peter Walsh but by her sense of the precarity of the Anglo-Indians’ position there. Mina makes reference to the stirrings of the political unrest and violence – along lines of racial/ethnic and religious difference – that we know would lead, twenty years later, to Partition (33). 

Mina’s family (like Daisy’s) is constantly sensitive to racialised tensions in India (and in her case, East Africa), which impact on them as Eurasians and precipitate their multiple migrations. Racialisation meant that issues of citizenship and identity loomed large for both Daisy (55) and Mina’s mother (72). Mina describes the ambivalent positioning of Anglo-Indians/Eurasians within the colonial governance in India which had ‘taught them to assimilate and to behave in all ways as if they were English’ (50-51). She outlines the stigma of ‘mixed ancestry’ (51) and the structural poverty which beset Anglo-Indians after the late 1900s (50). Mina writes, ‘I felt ill when I was growing up encountering some Indians: the ridicule and scorn they heaped on us’ (51). When her family migrated to Britain the racism continued. She described how her mother internalised the ‘colour conscious’ (49) racism in Britain; how Mina and her siblings were teased for being coloured and how, as a result, Mina ‘avoided other children’ (50). These racialised tensions persist in the contemporary world. While researching Woolf in Britain some years later, Mina is acutely aware of the racialised violence constantly profiled in the media there (such as the Westminster attack by Khalid Masood) (20). 

I quoted above Mina’s statement – ‘without an argument, without a history, Daisy’s voice is exotic or historical fiction [my emphasis]’ (176) – suggesting that argument and history might be read as the core elements of the novel-essay. Daisy & Woolf, as a novel-essay, can be understood as emerging at the intersection of these two discursivities. In my reading of Cahill’s novel, to this point, I’ve argued that Mina’s documentation of how her own and Daisy’s complex worlds are shaped by colonial histories allows us to understand the two women’s fraught positionality as Anglo-Indians. This documentary discursivity, I’m proposing, could be identified as the ‘essayistic’ trajectory of Cahill’s novel-essay. Mina asserts that research on/documentation of Anglo-Indians is indispensable to her novel whose main work, she declares, is ‘the historical restoring of my community’ (75). There is a convergence here between her work and Cahill’s.

The relationship between Mina and Cahill is complex. At the core of the novel is Cahill’s project to resurrect Daisy. Daisy’s story is in part Mina’s story which in turn resonates with autofictional echoes of Cahill’s life. These complex layerings are mediated by the epistolary first-person address, which both Mina and Daisy adopt. We can note the significance of the analytical, investigative, first-person voice in the context of the documentary imperative of the novel where Daisy and Mina – in their letters and journal entries – observe, chronicle, and salvage the daily and the political life of the world around them. (They draw on the same style of ‘moments accruing’ (171) through which Mrs Dalloway records her world). Their end goal, however, as I have argued, is quite different from Woolf’s. It is to ‘refus[e] demise’ (291) of what Mina describes as ‘my people’ (16) and, further, to ‘control their own destiny’ (219) through acts of narration. The immediacy of the first-person in Mina’s and Daisy’s stories bears a personalised testimony to the silences, elisions and losses which, when exhumed, bring to light a newly recognised history. We must not forget that this is Daisy’s story too; the reviewer quoted at the start of this review comments that Mina’s story overpowers Daisy and ‘swamps’ her. This comment is hard to justify given the complex and rich evocation of Daisy’s journey and its beautifully elaborated water themes; her psychological journey through grief and spurned love which shadow her physical voyage, and the motifs of travel as survival and reinvention.

Daisy and Woolf is an outstanding contribution to the global literary canon in general, and to localised and specific canons such as Australian literature, women’s literature, and literature by people of colour (POC), to name but a few. Cahill’s ground-breaking novel, in its layered inter-textuality, in effect maps out the dialogues and traffic between these various canons, outlining the discursive politics which inform their (troubled) white histories of inclusion and exclusion, of orientalism and subordination.

Works Cited

Cahill, Michelle. 2022. Daisy & Woolf. Sydney: Hachette.
Hickman, Valerie Reed.”Clarissa and the Coolies’ Wives: Mrs. Dalloway figuring transnational feminism.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.1 (2014): 52-77.
Stubbings, Diane. July 2022. “Delible Impressions Liberating Daisy Simmons”.  Australian Book Review.

ANNE BREWSTER is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015). She is series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Adele Dumont reviews A Kind of Magic by Anna Spargo-Ryan

July 12, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

A Kind of Magic

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761150739

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT
 
 
 
From its outset, A Kind of Magic establishes two distinct kinds of language. There’s Spargo-Ryan’s narration, as she recounts meeting with her new therapist: this voice is warm and confiding. The language she employs is vibrant and all her own: she likens her anxiety, for example, to ‘being trapped in jelly and also being allergic to jelly’(6). It’s laden with humour and irony, too: the narrator worries that the thongs she’s worn to the appointment are going to make a bad impression, and what’s more, their slapping sound might disturb the ‘sick people’ in the medical centre; the ‘patients with actual problems’(4). Within this same opening chapter, we’re introduced to a medical lexicon, which Spargo-Ryan informs us she’s become well-versed in: ‘I feel dissociated, I have intrusive thoughts’(6). These two sorts of language indicate two spheres of knowledge: the first, clinical and official; the second, intimate and embodied. The therapist’s PhD in clinical psychology is displayed on the wall; she is a ‘specialist in anxiety and psychosis’(4). But Spargo-Ryan tells us she is ‘also a specialist’ in these conditions, ‘but in the other way, where sometimes they try to kill me’(4).

This juxtaposition of the official and the personal persists throughout the book. Chapter headings borrow from technical definitions of various mental illnesses: ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges or impulses’; ‘a mood disorder associated with childbirth’. The chapters themselves flesh out how these symptoms and diagnoses manifest in Spargo-Ryan’s lived reality. Though this reality is often incredibly difficult, its domestic, suburban trappings will be familiar to readers: for a period, driving her kids to school feels insurmountable; she develops an intense fear of Sundays, and spends her entire weekends curled on the couch; at one point, she celebrates being able to walk to the end of her verandah. Other sections of the book – particularly those detailing breaks in conscious thought – describe a reality that will be less recognisable to many readers: she describes, for example, watching her fingertips melt into the floor. One of the book’s overarching achievements is to illustrate just how individual and multifaceted the one illness (and even the one feeling) can be. Her mother’s way of being anxious (worrying about others’ safety), for example, is different from her grandmother’s (checking things). Psychosis for one person might involve grand delusions, but for Spargo-Ryan, it is more ‘quietly disruptive’ (101), involving a fogging of her senses. When she experiences post-natal depression, she realises there are different ways to feel sadness: her usual, existential dread now co-exists with another, more acute despair. And while A Kind of Magic is ostensibly about darker emotions, Spargo-Ryan makes room for pleasure, tenderness, desire, and fun. It’s possible, she tells us, to be at once depressed and optimistic; sometimes she is ‘overwhelmed by a kind of uncut joy’ (316).

In this way, A Kind of Magic works to undo and complicate some of the entrenched and insidious stereotypes associated with particular mental illnesses. But more than that, by choosing to foreground her personal (messy, chaotic, magical) reality, Spargo-Ryan exposes the (sanitised, cold) reductiveness of standard medical literature, with its tendency to generalise, and to deal in abstracts.

Underpinning A Kind of Magic is a search for the right words; ones that will do justice to the author’s experience in all its specificity. Society, according to Spargo-Ryan, will only tolerate ‘a few of the broad-brush words, like depression and anxiety’ (132) but we are still ‘a long way from having an accepted vocabulary to describe mental health concerns’(134). The words we do have can have too vast or muddy a meaning, or they can carry stigma and value judgement; what’s more, these labels are routinely revised and re-categorised. Spargo-Ryan’s solution to this deficiency of language, both in the therapeutic space and within this book, is to create a language for herself. Often this language is richly allusive: she describes feeling ‘like my soul is a few inches to the right of my body’(205); elsewhere, she tells us that ‘all the breath was pulled from my body like a clown’s infinite handkerchief’(232). Aged nineteen, before she’s ‘learned any of the vocabulary for this’, she tells one therapist, it’s ‘like there’s a layer of cling film over everything’(120). Some passages, mirroring the author’s state of psychic disorder, fragment syntax and loosen the rules which usually govern written language: ‘…get out of my way don’t breathe just force the air in grab it fistfuls of it shove it drink it punch it you will suffocate…’ (17).

This search for a more precise language is more than a literary exercise; according to Spargo-Ryan, language matters deeply when it comes to a patient’s treatment. Correct diagnosis relies on an individual’s capacity to articulate their experience, ‘and if you can’t find the words (medical professionals) will find them for you’(129). Because the vocabulary we have to hand is so limited, ‘what we mean could be worlds apart from what they hear’(135). Further, clinical language can strip a patient of ‘autonomy, boldness and authority’(139).

While Spargo-Ryan doesn’t privilege clinical language, not does she completely discount it. Her idiosyncratic personal narrative is interspersed with sections breaking down technical terms such as ‘identity diffusion’, ‘complex post-traumatic stress’ and ‘autonoetic consciousness’. Readers of Spargo-Ryan’s previous works of fiction won’t be surprised by her literary flair in A Kind of Magic, but here she demonstrates a separate skill for the pedagogical. In highly accessible language, she’s able to explain, for example, how memory is critical to the formation of identity; the phenomenon of mental time travel; how a fear of abandonment can develop.

In interrogating the intersections of medicine, language, narrative, and selfhood, A Kind of Magic represents a vital contribution to the emergent field of ‘medical humanities’. It is part of a growing body of nuanced, personal accounts of mental illness by Australian writers. From a medical humanities perspective, such accounts are valuable in enriching medical practitioners’ understanding of particular conditions and highlighting how professional, technical language can create a gulf between doctor and patient. One of medical humanities’ hopes is that an emphasis on subjective experience will lead to more compassionate, communicative doctors, and better health outcomes for patients (1). In an interview, Spargo-Ryan expresses delight at some readers reporting having used her book as a tool to help explain their experience to loved ones, or to psychologists. Even if her words don’t quite fit someone’s own experience, she says, still ‘it gives them a starting point to go: yeah, that kind of is what it’s like, except for me, maybe it’s a little more like: I’m the colour blue!’2.

A memoirist must always grapple with memory’s instability and fallibility, but particularly so when the author’s mind is afflicted by serious, chronic mental illness. Spargo-Ryan is acutely aware of this, repeatedly drawing attention to the constructed-ness of her written narrative and pointing out that trauma can have the effect of melding an individual’s past and present. She’s quick to acknowledge that which she doesn’t quite remember (often the who/ when/ where) and that which she does (often sensory details, like ‘the sound Dad’s wipers made as they slapped against the rain’ (196). She includes alternative possible origin stories for her own illness, and in some instances even provides multiple versions of the one specific memory. Aged nine, she believed her mother had literally died on the couch; as an adult she reframes the scene thus: ‘She had panicked, and I had understood that to mean she was dead/ in danger/ unable to take care of me/ didn’t love me’ (34). Crucially, Spargo-Ryan points out that her adult understanding doesn’t negate her child’s experience: to this day, this is the most distressing childhood memory she holds; ‘in reality, the lasting impact was as traumatic as I felt it was’ (35). Most compelling of all, she questions whether the unverifiability of memory even matters. At a psychological level ‘even if I recognise the events never happened, the foundations they created for me are real’(36).

Spargo-Ryan’s sparkling optimism infuses A Kind of Magic. The personal narrative she charts — from her grandparents’ generation, to her own upbringing, and through to her own parenting — parallels a broader evolution in mental health literacy, an evolution which books like this one will surely contribute to.

Cited
1. “The medical humanities: literature and medicine”, Femi Oyebode, in Clinical Medicine, 2010.
James and Ashley Stay at Home Podcast, May 2nd, 2023.

ADELE DUMONT is the author of No Man is an Island. Her second book, The Pulling, is forthcoming with Scribe in early 2024.

Alison Stoddart reviews After the Rain by Aisling Smith

July 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

After the Rain

by Aisling Smith

Hachette

ISBN 9780733648793

Reviewed by ALISON STODDART

After the Rain is the debut for Melbourne-based author, Aisling Smith, a previous winner of the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. The novel is an enticing exploration of diaspora and all its inherent obstacles encountered by migrants, including the internalised racism that simmers beneath benign white Australia of the 1970’s. 

After the Rain exposes generational trauma, but not in the traditional sense.  Its themes are childhood angst and the way childhood parameters influences our adult lives.  Family life is explored: divorce, raising children, sibling rivalry, all the usual expectations and disappointments.  

The narrative point of view rests with its three female protagonists and is mainly focussed on Benjamin, Malti’s husband and father of their two daughters Ellery and Verona. Each women’s relationship with Benjamin alters the different ways they perceive him.  His presence is felt in every facet of the novel, but the reader only gets to know him through the eyes of the three women.  Benjamin does not have a direct voice or point of view.

Malti Fortune is a young woman of Indian-Fijian heritage who moves to Melbourne from Fiji in the mid 1970’s to study law at Melbourne University.  At university that she meets Benjamin, an aspiring linguist who likes to draw attention away from himself with clever use of language. The pair fall in love and marry despite Malti being in contempt of the institution.

The novel opens with Malti and Benjamin taking possession of their new home and Malti is pregnant, a harbinger child who doesn’t come to fruition. We see how she views the actions of Benjamin for this brief period of time, the first year in their house. Malti, a lawyer, is calm and matter of fact. But there are contradictions in her personality. She carries superstitions from her childhood growing up in Fiji. She is also unreliable as a narrator, as disturbing aspects of her marriage are easily noticed by the reader but seem to pass Malti. Benjamin is not present for the relocation to their new house which Malti conveniently makes excuses for. This suspicious behaviour which Malti doesn’t seem to be able to recognise, is readily apparent to the reader.  

There is foreshadowing early in the novel of impending trouble in the marriage with a recounting of their wedding anniversary dinner. Malti and Benjamin’s exchange of gifts is suggestive of where this marriage is heading.  A boring unimaginative pair of cufflinks for Benjamin ‘she had been working in the CBD too long, this was a present for a lawyer rather than a linguist’ (p 7). And a foreboding filled present of sharp kitchen knives for Malti ‘sharp presents sever relationships’ (p 8).

Smith does not assign blame wholly to one party but rather hints at a lack of insight in Malti’s character as well.

Ellery, the elder daughter takes up the perspective in Part 2. Her’s is a troubled relationship with Benjamin as she experiences early on in her childhood the unreliable and undependable aspects of her father’s nature.  Facets which she cannot find within herself to understand and forgive.

Part 3 is by Verona, the conflicted youngest child who likes to think she is Benjamin’s favourite. Like all last born, she struggles with her own worth and the jealousy that is inherently present in the youngest.  These children who carry the legacy of coming into the family last and therefore not establishing themselves fully in parental eyes.  Ellery and Verona both struggle with the highs and lows of their upbringing and all three women are seeking answers, each haunted by her own ghosts, and by Benjamin.

An overarching theme of the novel raises the question of where does a person feel most at home? Is it in their culture or in their geographical location? Where does one get a sense of place? Do you need to have ancestors to appreciate a country, and if this was so then would new migrants ever be able to settle, to feel a kinship and love for a place?

Smith cleverly references this idea of inherited superstition with the inclusion of three different takes on Fijian folklore that impact each female character.  Early in the novel we learn that Malti believes in Udre Udre, a famous cannibal who pursued immortality by eating 1000 bodies.  Malti is taken to visit his grave as a child and upon driving away, glances uneasily over her shoulder, checking that he is not following. The unwitting handing down of Malti’s belief in Udre Udre, Ellery’s discovery and entertaining of the belief of Kuttichatham and Verona’s ghost Bhoot cast a dark cloud over all three women.

Smith also makes reference to the Fijian coups that occur in Malti’s homeland three times over the course of her adult life.  Although she is a citizen of her new land and a willing participant in its daily life, she still takes interest, and is drawn constantly, to her homeland, helped along by the fact her parents still live there.  With Malti’s reading in newspapers of the coups, Smith is able to draw a parallel between the despair felt by a child of a country that is slowly cannibalising itself and the same sense of despair Malti’s two daughters feel about their father’s diminishing interaction in their lives.  He too is becoming a shrinking image in their rear vision mirror.

While thought provoking and well executed, the novel lacks some punch in the engagement of the reader. Its timeline jumps around the linear progression of the narrative arc, which is sometimes hampered, and which in turn can lose the interest of the reader.  Smith does get back on track with the switching to each new narratorial perspective.

Further, the storyline does not build to any sort of crescendo or climatic ending.  It is more about families, relationships, generations and inherited familial traits like superstition. A strength of the novel lies in how the characters reconcile differences between family members and find ways around the disparity in expectations to move forward. 

Smith’s debut is very much a generational novel although Smith does not seem to explore fully the relationship between Malti and her own parents.  Noticeably strange was that Malti never takes her own daughters back to Fiji to visit.  But there is a definite impact of Malti’s childhood on the family.  The feel of Fijian/Indian culture is dotted throughout with the references to blue water and yellow sands and childhood superstitions like Udre Udre.  And when the girls are older and the perspective switches to Ellery and then Verona, they often mention Fiji when they are thinking about their mother.  They even ask their mother why they never went to Fiji and how they would have liked to have visited. Perhaps this can be answered by the act of sole parenting which if Malti is to undertake successfully, she has to take into account her feelings for Benjamin, and also to understand the role her relationship with her parents has in her own parenting.  

There is a coda chapter at the end of the novel that serves to bring the story arc full circle but also provides some lovely insights into the forgotten aspects of a broken relationship.  Smith beautifully alludes to memories that were never made. One such example is the miniscule event of her first baby, the one that never came to pass. Malti refers to them as ‘fermented wishes and lost hopes’ (p 353). When timelines abruptly stop, something that is often forgotten can whisper through the mind when one is looking at old photos. 

Ultimately the reader is left with the melancholy feeling that Malti is also thinking of Benjamin as well, the father of her children and someone she once loved deeply, who will forever hover as memories but also in the faces of Ellery and Verona.

After The Rain is a moving and thoughtful journey from an exciting new literary talent. It raises the question of generational trauma.  Is childhood trauma ubiquitous? The influence of parents is undeniable, yet their own trauma and manifestations always need to be taken into consideration when reflecting on diaspora and migrant life.

ALISON STODDART is a country born and bred, Sydney writer currently undertaking a master’s degree at Macquarie University which she is hoping to finish soon. She completed her BA Degree majoring in Creative Writing in 2020. Twitter @a_hatz5