June 13, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carielyn Tunion-Lam (she/they) is a writer, videopoet, educator, and cultural worker. She has worked in the arts & cultural sector, the community services sector, and has experience using creative strategies in grassroots community organising.
Carielyn is interested in exploring themes of radical softness and nostalgia, and the tropical Gothic from an anti-colonial, diasporic perspective. She is a participating artist in Curious360 by CuriousWorks, and her work has been published by kindling & sage, Mascara Literary Review, Emerging Writers Festival, SBS Filipino and KAP Magazine. She is currently studying a Master’s in Literature & Creative Writing at WSU. Carielyn’s ancestral roots are in the archipelago of the so-called Philippines, and Kowloon, Hong Kong. She currently lives, studies, works and treads respectfully on unceded Burramattagal on Dharug country.
I am a deep-sea fisherwoman, but I do not catch fish
“…the diasporic woman’s identity is always already fractured and for her[,] autobiographical writing and the process of subject formation lies in celebrating the fracture rather than attempting to cure it.” – Bidisha Banerjee, 2022.
I went handline fishing once and was useless at it. I ended up seasick, huddled and damp in the stern the whole ride back to shore. Years later I would rent a cheaply converted garage in Umina, my answer to a yearning to be near the sea. I would swear up and down Ocean Beach Drive that I’d learn how to fish, hellbent on the idea that if I eat it, I should be able to hunt it or harvest it. But to this day, I’ve never caught a single fish.
Dr Leny Strobel says that Filipinos are consigned to fishing – not just because our skin is home to the salt of our islands – but because we’re fated to gather stories turned adrift. To those of us for whom fragmentation is genesis and legacy, fishing for stories is a way of coming full circle. A way of mapping the fractures and fissures that make up the ever-shifting landscape of our histories, our selves.
So okay, I may be shit at fishing but perhaps I am a fisherwoman after all.
*
Separation
I float a wave back to the Parañaque house. A bougie two-storey townhouse with stucco walls packed tight with dreams. Bordered by coastland in one of Metro Manila’s earliest gated villages, the estate was bankrolled by the Banco Filipino empire before its forced closure under the first Marcos dictatorship. Papa’s modest self-made fortune had just reached its peak when he bought the plot, and it would be another decade or so before finances would start to dip. He grew up struggling, and mama’s family still were, so maybe this house was their way of buying into a vision of security and success. I remember it being huge in the way everything is when you’re a kid. Crossing the Pacific again some twenty years later, I’d come back to an anachronism. How much smaller it would seem.
My parents built the house in the early-1990s, drunk on the siren song of domestic bliss. My father used sand and bare hands. My mother opted for perennial plants. I imagine them playing house in some high-stakes game of pretend: man, not-wife, and the new baby. In a few years, they could enrol the child to an international school nearby. The woman could start a small business selling locally-made Narra-wood furniture to rich households. The man might even leave his wife. They’d be a real family. When you wish upon brick and mortar against the Amihan tides.
Over the years, the waters would rise. Trade winds would blow their relentless cycles but the house would stay the same. An empty, yearning nest. It would miss out on first words and first steps, stay oblivious to fists and fights, the paranoia and bald-faced lies. Its walls would never feel the touch of warm hands and its windows would never open for sunlight darting through its rooms. Termites and mice would lay claim to the bones. A salty damp would set into the floorboards. Its foundations would crack and loosen underfoot, an ocean between us, always.
The neighbours would set their sights on it. They’d pick its locks and enter by stealth. Maybe they sought to lick the gilt off the cornices, scrape the good intentions off the walls. Maybe they took the door off its hinges to see if anything worthy lay on the other side of the frame. Ethically, I don’t oppose the break ins. Why should a house stand empty in a city where sleeping bodies line the streets?
Twenty years would pass and I’d scrap for a plane ticket back. I’d smash the padlock off the gate, jarring in its errant coat of red applied by some interloping budding decorator.
I’d stand in the wreck of it and let the smell of forgetting fill my pores. I’ve scrubbed my body many times since, but I carry it with me still, to this day.
*
I hesitate to identify as Filipino. The word derives from the Spanish coloniser king Philip who, through Magellan’s colonial activities, staked false claim over the archipelago’s diverse peoples, lands, skies and waterways. To frame myself as a little Philipp-ite is reprehensible to me yet I use this label as a way of speaking the language of the dominant tongue, to use its tools of categorisation as a way of carving out space. It is a way of having voice, misconstrued though it may be – a way of insisting, I am here! My people have dived for pearls with friends here, well before your white sails bruised these shores.
The poet Eunice Andrada has been known to identify as an Ilonggo poet, resisting the homogenous ‘Filipino’ label which reeks of Tagalog hegemony in the archipelago. The issue of identification and identity is further complicated for me by lost family and ancestral histories. It was only on my 33rd birthday last year I learned my maternal grandmother was from Pangasinan, land of a thousand islands. I have no stories, no photographs of her as a child to go by, but this is how I like to picture her. A girl growing up by the sea.
*
“Non-fatal drowning describes a drowning incident where the individual survives. In some cases, an individual may not suffer any serious health complications following a non-fatal drowning. However, in other cases, non-fatal drowning can significantly impact an individual’s long-term health outcomes and quality of life.” – Royal Life Saving Australia
The first time I remember drowning:
Ma and I had just moved into a rental in Dee Why, which kids at my new school called ‘the ghetto’ of the Northern Beaches. I remember thinking, if this is ghetto, you’d die to see where my family live. I’d soon realise they called it ‘the ghetto’ because it was the only ‘ethnic enclave’ on the insular Peninsula(r). The only suburb in the area with an Asian grocer and an African beauty supply store, where the Pinoy and Pasifika families lived, where the Chinese restaurants were legit. I’d never lived in the suburbs before. All I’d known was city smog and chaotic traffic, so I fell quick and hard for the nearby beach.
I went walking on the shore in my school dress one day, brogues and socks on my hands, toes questing in the sand. Suddenly, the sky rumbled grey and the tide began to surge. Water climbed my legs fast and snatched me up into the churn. My mouth filled with saltwater. I started to swallow. I remember thinking, goodbye, mama – strangely calm about it all. That’s when I felt a warm hand close firmly over mine, guiding me out of the crush. My head burst above water, kaleidoscopes of seafoam and upside-down pine trees in my eyes. I lay on the wet sand, strewn under a glassy sky. Soaked to the bone and completely alone.
I don’t remember much else, everything is a vague before and after that moment. My memory has always been hazy. Twenty years later, I’d remember that drowning and wonder, was it a memory, a vision, a dream? I still can’t decide. Whatever happened, I know it was my lola who saved me.
*
When I tell my mother this, she gasps.
Da, the same thing happened to me!
A monsoon season sometime in the 60s drowned the Pasig River leaving it bloated and swollen. She went swimming in the floodwater, seeking pearls amidst candy wrappers and bits of corrugated iron, floating wreckages of plastic debris. Maybe the current got stronger, maybe her little arms got tired and she started to sink. But Naynay reached into the river and pulled her out in a strong, calloused grip.
How funny, ha, Da. She saved me but she was so angry with me.
That night I dreamt of mama as a girl, eating clams with her mother. They fished them out of the water, scooping them up in their hands by the riverside, heads bowed like grateful penitents.
*
Transition
People tell me I look Japanese. They say, but you don’t look Filipino, which is funny because the archipelago comprises nearly 200 ethnolinguistic groups with distinct cultures, stories, Peoples, and rituals. Not to mention the myriad cross-cultural ancestries from beyond the oceans before the intrusion of colonisers and conquistadors. People rarely clock me as Hong Kongese, except my Filipino family who laugh themselves stupid over jokes about my eyes looking ‘inchik’. Truth is, I don’t know if I should identify as Chinese either. My father calls himself a Chinese man but identifies more as a Hong Kong man.
Can I just identify as an island gal? An island baby they-by lady?
*
I started the process of forgiving my father around ten years ago. We drove around Kowloon listening to ‘Don’t cry, Joni’ and ‘La Vie en Rose’ on repeat while he dredged up memories of Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong in WWII like pulling dead fish from the sea. He told me of bodies piled high on streets now stacked with concrete pylons and apartment towers, the same streets beneath our feet. During martial law, people hid in their homes as often as they could. But my father, only seven at the time, tired of fear and the hunger in his belly, would sneak out to shine imperial soldiers’ boots in exchange for biscuits which he’d save to eat with his siblings.
My lola would have endured the Japanese occupation of the Philippines but when I ask my mother about this, she tells me she has no idea what I’m talking about.
My island homes sink and swim with the weight of remembering and forgetting.
*
I met Papa as an old man this year. To be fair, with sixty years between us, he’s been old my whole life. Mortality on our minds, he took me to visit his parents’ graves for the very first time. I balked at the interminable staircases at St Raphael’s cemetery where his father, my 爺爺 rests. Irene was there, his girlfriend of 30 years who’s also 30 years his junior (I met her, too, for this first time this year). She held him as he gripped the flaking green rail, one step after the other. I was scared he’d fall or faint, but he refused a single word of complaint, out of reverence or stubbornness, I’m not sure. Oliver and I sentried in front and behind. A black butterfly trailed us. Hobbling back down, we made the shape of some lopsided creature of grief.
His mother, my 嫲嫲, lay in Wo Hop Shek some 40 minutes away, in a Buddhist graveyard on the hills overlooking Fanling. I was inept at bai-san but I lit the incense, bowed my head thrice and burned the bag of paper prayers adorned with Kwun Yum riding the sea, lotus flowers at her feet. I held Papa’s hand as ash and smoke unfurled in the blue silk sky.
The next day, he confessed with tears in his eyes that his sons don’t visit his parents’ graves. We were in the backseat, ‘La Vie en Rose’ playing again. His unspoken fear that they will not visit him either sat between us.
*
When Lam Him died, he left behind five adult children as his legacy. One was my father, Lam Shuk Chiu, who, devasted by his father’s death, tried to give his heartache purpose by honouring his Honourable Father’s death, honourably. He threw himself into funerary arrangements, buying the finest oranges, chickens, and pigs heads for offerings; and bargaining (respectfully) with a nun to guarantee his father’s dying wish for a Catholic burial after a lifetime as a sometimes-practicing Buddhist – a testament to the care he received at the Catholic hospice where he’d stayed.
After an evening meal, the grieving family sat together on mats on the floor to share memories of their devoted patriarch. As they did, the lanterns began to flicker and the dogs out on the terrace barked feverishly into the night. My father felt the room go cool. A light pressure touched his forehead, and he lost consciousness. When he came to, a sense of peace washed over him.
That’s when I knew, he tells me.
There is no such thing as ghosts. Only spirits.
Incorporation
Is there another me in a same-but-different version of Hong Kong? I imagine her also 33, speaking Cantonese since she was a baby. She visits her ancestors’ graves often, knows the right joss sticks to buy, doesn’t get anxious about her choice in flowers for offerings.
Is there a version of me in the so-called Philippines? She probably doesn’t bother with inane questions like this.
*
My mother has a lot of stories she doesn’t know how to tell. She buried them in forgotten soil and lost the words to unearth them again.
She’ll rewrite herself again.
My father’s stories always lied just behind his tongue. Now he’s opening up, telling me ghostsongs and lovestories around his old fishing town.
Me? I am a deep-sea fisherwoman, but I do not catch fish.
Videopoem (still): ‘lullaby for a fisherwoman’, 2023
Cited
Banerjee, B. “Alphabets of Flesh”: Writing the Body and Diasporic Women’s Autobiography in Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines, English Studies, Vol. 103:8, 1210-1227, 2022. DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2022.2105025
Del Rey, L. ‘Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing’, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard, Polydor, Interscope Records, 2023.
Strobel, L. Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans, 2nd ed. The Centre for Babaylan Studies, 2015
Tan, C. ‘Interview #125 – Eunice Andrada’. Liminal Mag, 2020. https://www.liminalmag.com/interviews/eunice-andrada
June 10, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ben Hession is a disabled writer living on Dharawal country, south of Sydney, Australia. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, the Cordite Poetry Review, Verity La, Bluepepper, Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing, Antipodes and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? He has reviewed poetry for Verity La and Mascara Literary Review. Hession is a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
Cemetery Visit
Sun-faded synthetic flowers adorning
the name plates – flourishes of petals, each
touching on personal, paled memories
of good works that had abounded
in life’s now abandoned field.
One day, their visitors will return, I guess,
to these living artifices of fidelity,
in hope – that plastic, resisting hope –
against our impermanence:
we’re seeing today, remaining in bloom.
June 9, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Grace Hall is a queer, crip writer and editor based in Naarm (Melbourne). Her writing explores the joys and pitfalls of growing up queer in rural Victoria. She is fueled (almost) entirely by potato and existential dread and currently reads a lot of non-fiction. Grace’s work has been published by Bramble Journal, Archer magazine, Enby Journal, Writers Victoria and elsewhere. Grace was a participant in Toolkits Lite: Non-Fiction program in 2022 and is 2024 Writeability fellow.
Red brick linoleum palace
The first house is Red Brick
It’s 2005. I’m freckled, tall for my age and perpetually worried. My primary school’s oval has been transformed into a fete; there are craft stalls scattered across the quadrangle where squeal pitched conversations between mothers conjugate. The teachers are volunteers – behind stands, barbeques, holding skipping ropes and flipping sausages onto their bellies. It’s weird to see them casually dressed, all in the one place.
I’m on the playground. I can’t skip two bars on the monkey bars, but I watch some girls in my class do it. Their checked dresses flutter. I squat, pick up tanbark and let it fall through my fingers. When Jordy, a new friend, steals me away from the tanbark to play soccer, I’m relieved. I adjust the elastic around my navy-blue shorts so that they’re long like the boy’s shorts and become so immersed in the kicking, receiving – the sweet smell of unearthed turf that my need to pee, urgently, comes as a surprise. Behind the paint-stripped goal posts are two portable toilets. Jordy’s mum notices me with my legs in a tangle, and points in the direction of them. I shake my head and she cocks hers slightly, the way a dog does when you ask it a question.
I might fall in, I tell her.
Mum drifts over in her floral short-sleeved dress, and she looks like an angel. They’re on the boundary line but I can hear Jordy’s mum. She’s sharing my response with mum, who giggles mildly and calls me over to her. I tell her that I need to go home. Gentle, and practiced, in loving me she doesn’t ask why.
I run under the red brick alcove of our house and nod to the fly screen held to the wall by a door stopper (last week it shaved white layers off my right heel). My fibres relax as I stare at the newspaper article of my parents saving beached whales. It’s blue-tacced to the back of the toilet door.
I flush. The relief I feel is intoxicating and it’s enough to propel me towards my sister who’s stripped off in the loungeroom, dancing across the glossy floorboards. I don’t usually like dancing, but I toss my hands to my shoulders and shuck my hips the way the purple wiggle does. Crisp, orange light streams through the windows, filtered through a flowering gum. We retire at track four on her ABC kids CD because that song is scratched and slip into our cotton pjs. Before bed, we push our two single bed frames together so that we’re close enough to hear each other dream.
Brown house with carpeted stairs
Mum is sick of the suburbs. Other mums always drop-in with gossip on their tongues and tell her stories about the houses on our street with cheating husbands. The news spreads like wildfire. One lady whispers to my mum, who’s nursing a milky tea, ‘it could happen to any of us’.
My parents decide it’s time for a sea change. They want bodies of water – to be bodies of movement.
You guys can run amok: mow grass plant natives sit around bonfires.
I don’t know what a sea change is.
‘Everyone’s doing it’, Dad says from behind the steering wheel, and I wonder who everyone is. We move into a rental with vomit coloured carpet stairs and a-frame ceilings. I decide it’s not a suburb because there are more wineries than houses. My sister gawks cheerily at the spiders in ceiling, but I’m all out of whack. On the first night in the brown house with carpeted stairs, I wake up Dad because I can’t find the light-switch for my room even though it glows in the dark, the white rectangle next to my door frame. I count the deep swirls on the pine board ceiling which makes me feel light and itchy. I creep across the cold checked tiles and inhale the stale cinnamon air that reminds me of op shops.
I skate from ‘I won’t be happy here’ to: ‘I’m sorry for waking you up, Dad’.
The next day, having sensed my disoriented state, Mum reminds that a house is just a house. She tells me, it’s the people inside that make it a home. I repeat this to myself while brushing my teeth, wondering where the elderly couple that lived here before us are now, and if they miss their old house like I miss mine.
This log cabin could be an air bnb
The next house is a log cabin on acres full of Cyprus pine. This one we own, a lie I don’t yet know much about. I call it ugly because it’s a word I’ve started to hear at school and because all my friends live in white walled houses. There’s a few gum trees but the Cyprus pines are taller. They’ve beaten the gums to the sun. At night you can hear the koalas roar. Dad tells me this is their mating sound which makes my tummy twist.
Before Mum and Dad buy the log cabin, they go for the house next door. At the auction, my brother is in tow of my father, clinging onto his baby blue sleeve. The numbers start and the real estate agent’s voice booms. He’s loud, so I don’t understand why he needs a megaphone. My brother senses that we’re losing.
He tries to whisper, ‘Daddy, do something’, but everyone can hear him. Dad looks at the gravel. I watch him intently because for the first time I really don’t know what he will do next.
We don’t get that house, but we get the one next to it a few months later. Mum says it’s meant to be because it is. I understand it as: a new house is a new experience; a new house is a new mortgage and under it is a family.
The pine walls last six months. Their disappearance is gradual. Mum and Grandpa lather each beam antique white. At night, I set up an elaborate game with barbie dolls. Between them are affairs, marriages, children growing up and moving away. Some of them buy mansions with laundry chutes and pearl shaped pools. My favourite doll is a blonde teenage boy who wears denim shorts and a basketball top. When he turns eighteen, he leaves his family – even though they own the mansion – to live with his girlfriend. She has hazelnut eyes and a floral mini skirt, so I understand why he left.
Linoleum palace
I’m twenty-one and the share house I live in is a linoleum palace. My housemates are vastly different from one another, but all come from a cluster of free dress schools in the Northern suburbs. One of them takes me under their wing because I am a country girl in a big city. I don’t realise it at the time, but I am only the country girl by comparison. When the clean and orderly housemate is away for the weekend my other house mate, who is messy – like me, try on multiple outfits in the living room. We take photos in the full-length mirror; the mission brown background makes us look older than we are. She cuts my hair and tells me stories of couch surfing in her early teens. When she finishes shaping my bob, holding my curls and then releasing them, she tells me I look like a queer dream. I don’t know what she means exactly, but I believe her because I can’t stop thinking about my housemate’s girlfriend, and the volume in her smirk when she greets me.
In this linoleum palace, one of my bedroom walls isn’t a wall, it’s just sliding doors, but it doesn’t matter because I’m a deep sleeper. The vinyl floors are peeling, we’re constantly chasing dust and newspaper, but it doesn’t matter because I have found my people. For some reason, though, I have to leave once a fortnight, home to the log cabin.
I’m like a yoyo, tightening and loosening.
One day, as I’m walking down Melville Road on the phone to my mum, she tells me that they’re renovating the tiny bathroom with no windows. She describes it: they’ll peel the logs off the side of the house and put a window in there, fix the water pressure, and populate it with the fake-plants from Kmart so she can’t kill them. That sounds nice I tell her. The shower in that bathroom was good to me – there was just enough room to sit at the bottom of it in the foetal position and let the tea-coloured tank water rain onto you.
‘Do you remember when you were so scared of drop toilets?’ She asks me. You’ve come so far, she laughs.
I do, I say. Of course I do.
Two of my housemates have a falling out. The third housemate is falling in love. The foundations of my chosen family unravel, and no one wants to use the kitchen anymore. Small decorative items that we each planted around the place begin to disappear: a vintage orange lamp, an Elvis clock and pastel-coloured clay vulvas. We try to blame it on each other – discretely – some of us cite the good times we had here. The brick BBQ crumbles. The door handles squeal. We burn sage but it doesn’t work. We all move out a month later, and I go back to the log cabin before I go anywhere else.
Stain glass means you’ve made it
I move into a colonial style farmhouse, deep in West Footscray. It’s the nicest house I’ve lived in. There’s a spa bath and his and hers basins and a room for my house mate’s keyboard to have its own room. There’s a chocolate-coloured fireplace in my bedroom that’s prohibited from use and the front door has stain glassed windows, apple tinted squares that frame a hearth.
I walk a lot. Down aisles, down Barkly Street, past dumpling houses and Ethiopian restaurants and commit to the idea of going there. I imagine sitting there with the woman I’m sort-of-dating, pouring her green tea, while my eyes dance across the road to colours of the market. But she’s in America visiting Stonewall, wearing the suit I leant her, unearthing the shades of her queerness.
When I pull up outside the colonial farmhouse (not the driveway because it’s always occupied), I sit and rehearse the anecdotes I’ll tell my housemates, because I haven’t yet worked out how to talk to them. I pat the car seat and phone people; I phone a voice, one of my favourite voices, but he’s distraught.
He has to move out of his rental because last week his girlfriend said, ‘I’m leaving’, without saying goodbye and without paying rent and without packing up their clothes.
‘I can’t sit in this house any longer’, he says to me, and I realise that a house can make you sick.
The house with cracks
The house that my girlfriend and I move into needs work. I convince her though, that it’s the house for us because real estate agents don’t like disabled people. I envision the faulty house as a god send, as though me and it have something shared in our dysfunction.
It needs painting, cracks need filling, garden needs weeding. The labour is looped, the cracks come back and the gaps under the doors welcome dust back in quicker than it leaves. The rooms need light and laughter, and consoling, but I don’t do the work because pain is trying to swallow me and sometimes I let it.
I watch my tired, beautiful girlfriend swish sugar soap onto the walls and work putty into cracks and ask myself: are we playing house or is this house playing us?
‘We don’t own this place, remember’, I say to her because after a few months I find that labouring is hard to watch.
I leave the house for the first time in months which teaches me that it’s warmer outside where the winter sun waves from behind cloud. A new friend lends me a book, The Shape of Sound by Fiona Murphy. In the prelude, Murphy writes that the meaning of atrium, in ancient roman times, is the heart of the house. It’s the first time I’ve read the body as close to a building and I feel unexpectedly consoled. We must find the heart of the house, becomes my new mantra when I unlock the front door.
It’s my girlfriend’s birthday and we’re out for the first time in months. We’re filling up on beer before a gig. The pub aesthetic is retro house; there are green velvet couches, orange cushions are stationed casually across armchairs. Otis Redding is playing. A beer is slid in front of me; and a smile from my girlfriend’s best-friend. I down it, feel it fizzing as it meets my medication. I am light and sleepy, but I promise myself I’ll make it to the next venue. I push the pain down. When I see the fifteen-flight staircase at the gig venue, I wish I had drunk another beer. I google their website with a shaky thumb. Under frequently asked questions is there’s an accessible toilet downstairs.
The math is quick but confusing. The music is upstairs. I wonder if other disabled patrons visiting this place have drunk less so that they pee less. I decide that that’s what I’ll do. There’s a chair-lift that runs along the flight of stairs it’s new and expensive, but I don’t want to use it. I can’t stand out like that. I want to call it inaccessibility, but I feel like I’m not allowed to. I use my walking stick to ascend the stairs. I’m visibly avoiding access.
Upstairs, the red curtains bellow behind the man on the stage who is shirtless and sweaty. The audience is following him, pulsing in and out, and his gruffy drunk voice is loving it. I need a chair, and there’s plenty of chairs. My girlfriend pulls one out for me. She looks at me which is her way of asking, are you okay? I nod. I’m on the outskirts of the mosh, until someone pulls up a chair next to me and speaks a sentence I don’t remember because really, it’s so nice to have someone on my level.
I can’t hold my pee any longer, so we book an uber that we can’t afford. The rain glinted road shines as we journy down Sydney Road. I’m thinking of bricks because like bricks, the weight of inaccessible buildings accumulates until it becomes a feeling: your heart dropping to the pit of your stomach. The uber pulls up in front our house, and I realise she’s been holding my hand the whole way home.
*
I don’t know when the house with cracks became a home. Maybe it happened in the mornings, accumulative, when the percolator bubbled over for the 100th time, and croaky good mornings grew into a kiss; or, when the cat chose a sunspot under the square window in the furthest room from the street. As soon as the dust settled, and the spinach in the garden was ready to harvest, the owner texted to say
Thank you for your work
But
My sons want to move in
Dad tells me we’re better off buying something. Pick mortgage over rent. Play rock, paper, scissors. The winner is rent.
He’s seen the ques on channel nine, how the desperation stretches all the way down the street.
Under scorching summer sun, I join the ques and try to drag my mind away from the heat in my legs, they’re molten in broad daylight. By staring at my calendar of house inspections I hang onto hope. We have a family dinner to celebrate the fact that we found a place to rent, against the odds, in the wake of eight weeks.
‘I feel sorry for your generation,’ my uncle says while he shovels pork crackle that snaps like a wishbone, into his mouth. ‘You’ll never own a house’. He pauses, sympathetically, or so that I can let the sentiment sink in, the reality of doom, but really, I’m upset because he just took the last piece of crackle.
May 30, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Wajeehah Aayeshah is a Muslim, female, brown, academic geek who loves collecting stories. She is interested in combining history, personal experiences, and contemporary socio-cultural context to create empathetic narratives. She is a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, designing curriculum and investigating kindness in higher education. She likes writing short stories, creative essays, bad poetry, and developing games with a dark sense of humour.
The girl who sat in a corner and sneezed
‘Buzz, buzz.’ I wake up due to the buzzing of my phone. It’s a text from Fatemah. She wants to know if I am still up for her Garden sculpture exhibition at the Heide.
‘It’s not even 7.00 Fati.’ I groan.
Ignoring her message, I try to get back to sleep. It is useless. My mind knows I am up and wants me to clear up the nasal passage. I try to find FES saline nasal spray. It ought to be somewhere on my bed. I can’t find it. Grumbling, I get out of my bed and go to lounge to grab another bottle from meds drawer. I have only done one nostril when my phone starts to ring. Keeping the spray in my hand, I rush to receive it. It’s my Kiwi partner calling from a different time-zone. He wants to know how bad the bleeding was.
‘What bleeding?’ I ask in a groggy voice.
Turns out that at some point at night, I had sent him a picture of my nosebleed. I have no memory of this action. Putting him on speaker phone, I check my WhatsApp. The picture shows a considerably higher amount of blood on three tissue papers. I try to look for the tissues for physical evidence. I find two with dried blood on them. Half listening to his concerned voice, I try to locate the third one.
‘Yeowwww!’ I find the FES nasal spray. It is right under my foot.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Riz can hear the pain in my voice.
‘Is your head hurting? Should I call someone to get you an ambulance?’ he is frantic.
‘No, no. I just stepped on something.’ Trying to calm him down, I pick up the bottle.
‘What about the nosebleed? How bad is it?’
‘It’s okay. Relax. I don’t even remember sending you this bloody picture.’ I take a pause to congratulate myself on my brilliant display of wit.
‘Did you see what I just did there? Bloody picture…’ I put the spray in my other nostril.
‘Zoya, would you stop being carefree about it?’ I can hear a distinct ‘beep beep’ tone of someone else calling me.
‘It’s just a nosebleed. Due to dry nose.’
‘Just go see your GP. Please. Just do it,’ he is literally pleading.
‘OK. OK. I will.’
The next 5 minutes are spent me convincing him I will get an appointment, while blowing my nose. He is still unconvinced, but we end the conversation and hang up.
‘Buzz buzz’. It’s Fatemah again.
‘Zoya, pick up.’
I call her back. She wants to make slight modification to our plans. She has added my name to the list of volunteers who would give visitors a tour of the exhibition. I am to reach the Heide Museum of Modern Art a couple of hours earlier to get a debrief. I am the ‘bestest’ person in the whole world. I say ‘OK’. Hanging up on her, I blow on my nose again. There is blood.
—
The doctor wants me to get another biopsy done. I tell her I had one done 3 months ago. This isn’t my regular doctor. After an hour of heavy nosebleed, I have Uber-ed into an emergency ward. My neck has started to cramp. I have been stretching it for too long now, holding a tissue trying to stop the blood flow. The doctor has already ordered an emergency MRI. I had an MRI 5 months ago. When I tell her this, she looks at me in a way only emergency doctors look at you. It is a mixture of exasperated, kind, bored, and overworked look. She asks the name of my GP and tells the nurse to get my records transferred as a priority. She doesn’t use these words. I have been into hospitals far too many times now to decode them.
‘Buzz buzz.’ It’s Fatemah. She wants to know where I am. All of sudden, I feel very tired and groggy. I tell her I am at Royal Melbourne Hospital emergency ward due to heavy nosebleed. I am fine and very sorry about not being at her exhibition. The nurse’s shadow is looming over me now. She wants to take me to MRI room. I tell Fatemeh this, put my phone on silent, chuck it in my bag, not wanting to deal with more phone calls, and follow the nurse.
She gives me a gown to change and tells me to lie down on the table. I have to remove my ring. It gets chucked in my bag as well. I think of Riz. He doesn’t know where I am, but I am too sleepy now to tell him. I doze off before the MRI starts.
—
I wake up in a room filled in a dim white light. I try to recall what it is called. It is the colour of my dad’s beard. Is Dad’s beard a good name for a colour? It can be a good name for a race horse. But I am against racing. Why would I think of a race horse name? I can’t move my body or my mouth. I try really hard. I can barely keep my eyes open. Is this how race horses feel when they are drugged? Someone is next to me. They are saying something, but I don’t understand. I doze off again.
—
I wake up again. This time, I can move my head. Fatemah is sitting on a chair next to me. Her head is covered, and she is reading a book. No, I correct myself. She is reciting a holy book. She senses my movement, looks up and smiles, finishing the line she was reading, closes the book. She says something to me, but I can’t hear her. I tell her that. But I can’t hear myself. I say it out loud. And again, and again. Nothing. It is super quiet. I can’t hear the ambience; light, air-conditioning unit, building, anything. My heart is starting to race. I am getting palpitations. I can feel my throat aching. I know I am yelling but I can’t hear it. A nurse rushes in. Fatemah is trying to calm me down. But she is making me more anxious. The nurse picks up a note pad, writes something on it with big letters shoves it into my face.
TEMPORARY HEARING LOSS.
I stop yelling. My throat a bit hoarse now. I look at the words for a few moments. Then look at the nurse. He is smiling at me. I look at the notepad again and look at Fatemah. She is staring at me with a smile as well, but her eyes have an alarmed look. As if, she is worried I might scream again. I point at ‘TEMPORARY’ and look at the nurse. He nods quickly, assuredly. He is very good looking. I feel my body slumping down. Something is trickling down my right cheek. I touch it. It’s a tear, I have been crying. Fatemah holds my right arm and shoulder tenderly, then gives me a soft, lop-sided hug. I hold on to her right arm, still unsure why I am crying.
—
‘So avoid wool, carpet and plants as much as possible, FES spray needs to be taken before the NASONEX one. Clean your nose after FES and keep the NASONEX liquid inside, every morning and at night. You can use FES during the day as well.’ It is the same emergency doctor.
All of my tests are clear. Just as before. There is nothing wrong with me. I only have allergies. I am told I can do Allergen immunotherapy or desensitisation test if I like. It is a bit expensive, but it lasts for 10 years. What about after 10 years? Will it get worse? I want to know. The doctor isn’t sure. It can’t really be predicted. One of those things.
I have had my share of one of those things. I leave the hospital with Fatemah, thanking Medicare and BUPA for covering my bills. I can no longer visit or be forcibly recruited as a volunteer for her Sculpture Gardens exhibition. Too soon to be around so many plants. She waves it off as if it isn’t a big deal. I know it is. She has been designing her exhibition for the past two years. She drops me home, fills my fridge with stuff that I might need for the next ten days and lets me be.
I make myself some tea, pick up a book and sit in my reading nook but fall asleep.
‘Buzz buzz.’ It’s Riz. His plane has landed. He’ll be at the house in a couple of hours. I read the message, smile, and blow my nose. There is blood.
May 9, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
S.V. Plitt is a queer author living and working in Naarm, Melbourne. Son’s writing has been published in Archer magazine, Darebin n-SCRIBE, and won second place in the Odyssey House Short Story Prize 2022. Their manuscript ‘Strange Intersections’ was Highly Commended in the VPLAs Unpublished Manuscript Competition 2022. They also appear on the (Un) Marginalised Season Two Podcast, discussing themes included in their writing, such as gender identity, mental health, religious oppression, and intergenerational trauma. Son draws inspiration from volunteering as a carer and their work in customer service.
A Fairy God Princess
A subversive tale of feminist woes
There once was a Fairy God Princess.
She kissed a lot of toads looking for her prince.
Not only toads, in fact.
She pranced through the forest kissing lizards and lions and amorous amphibians.
With each slippery kiss, her disappointment grew.
The disappointment grew and grew inside her belly like a bag of snakes in a battle for sovereignty.
Battling for the prize of turning the princess into a lizard, or a lion or an amorous amphibian.
They fought fiercely, keeping the princess up at night.
Whenever she drifted into an exhausted slumber, the lizards or goannas, the toads or the lions would pull the tendon by her tailbone.
Like a puppet, her legs wriggled and squirmed out of bed and tried to run away with her.
To turn the princess into a toad or lion or amorous amphibian.
To make her a bride.
But the princess was also a warrior and worried that if her legs ran away with her,
the battle in her belly would boil and boil, filling her up with a storm for scales and fur.
She begged the moon and the stars and the emptiness in between,
that the lizard prince whose eyes gleamed like black jewels,
the prince that had so chivalrously waited in the forest for a decade,
that he might be the victor, in this battle of bravado that boiled in her belly.
But like all the contestants, his price for saving her from the lions and the toads and the amorous amphibians, was sovereignty. To possess the flesh in which she resided. To grow a lizard in her belly. To grow a king.
The Fairy God Princess, the warrior that worried, knew deep down that the flesh in which she resided, could not be divided. It was hers and hers alone.
No heir, no king, no lizard, no amorous amphibian, no lion, and no toad would chain her to the future. She prayed to the moon and the stars and the emptiness in between.
An answer came. It was a vast and empty silence that spread through her heart, her belly and her mind. She relinquished her title. No more a Fairy God Princess.
She remembered her true identity and became they. They knew the I in them. Their I was in all of the fairies, gods and princesses, in all of the princes, lizards and toads, all of the goannas, the lions and the amorous amphibians. They were all of it and nothing. And belonged to themselves and no one.
And they all lived ever after in a confusing land of grammatically problematic pronouns.
May 5, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Az is a 26-year-old trans wheelchair user with an acquired brain injury. His works of both fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such publications as Voiceworks, Archer, Overland, Mascara Review, ABC News, and the 2023 anthology of the Australian Short Story Festival. He is currently completing a Master of Literature and also graduated with distinction with a Bachelor of Biomedical Science in 2017. He was recently one of the 2023 ABC Regional Storyteller Scholars, and is also an enthusiastic user of social media. When he’s not writing, he’s spoiling his assistance dog, Ari, working out, or getting yet another tattoo.
When I listened to the audiobook recording of Lauren Groff’s Matrix, I could hear those men in the kitchen, the ones with scarred knuckles and violence in their hearts and between their legs. Inside my empty stomach, the familiar icy snake of fear writhed. I gripped my pocketknife and repositioned myself on the pillow I had wedged under my butt to prevent pressure sores. I tried to ignore the acidic flush of anxiety and focus instead on the excellent narration by Anjoah Andoh.
As the night progressed, the murky yellow light of my room in the crisis accomodation building—the “house of horrors” my friends and I have come to refer to it—faded, and was replaced by the clean, bright air of a nunnery in medieval England. Instead of the pall of cigarette smoke, I inhaled the scent of fresh bread and the vague musk of manure. Instead of the sound of my housemate pissing loudly with the bathroom door open, I heard space cracked open, expansive—a placid quiet in the time before motorisation, broken only by bird calls and the hushed voices of nuns passing below my open window.
Matrix had been a gift from my cherished friend and author, Katia Ariel. I wish I could do more, she said (or rather typed, as we are geographically separated by a state line) but it is the understatement of the century, or at least of my year: she had in fact given me an entirely new world.
Matrix tells the story of a community of nuns led by a character named Marie, who is based on the very real figure of Marie de France, a woman who lived in the 12th century and is considered by many historians to be one of the first writers of French prose. In the first couple of pages, we are introduced to both the Abbey and the language Groff uses, which is wonderfully evocative of the decadent prose of high fantasy:
‘She sees for the first time, the Abbey: pale and aloof on a rise in this damp valley; the clouds drawn up from the ocean and wrung against the hills in constant rainfall.’
(Chapter 1, 00:35-00:45).
However, while the language used in Matrix sates the guilty craving that high fantasy indulges, it describes a reality not too far removed from our own. Matrix presents a version of history close to that which likely did exist but was never documented: one full of queer desire and love and unapologetic feminine power. These are historical wounds that have long scarred, but which, through fiction, Groff somehow manages to draw fresh blood. Or, maybe not blood, but something else: something iridescent and shimmering.
My phone dings and it is a message from a member of my personal squadron of superheroes, all of whom are women. Here, from a desire for political correctness, I am tempted to replace the word “women” with “people of gender diversity”, but, while there are people, precious beyond words, of diverse gender identity in my life, it is simply true that my first line of defence during that time were all cis women. These women were the ones both willing and able to drop everything and rush to my aid, the ones with both the will and the resources to save me, to pluck me from between the teeth of the corrupt machine of a society that still feeds on bodies that don’t fit into the silhouette of the norm. Women. I will refer to them as they are (I will not erase them, as has happened enough in mainstream history. To celebrate women is not to erase the trans and non-binary experiences, but to honour the historical bedrock that underpins gender divergence.)
The message reads: Are you OK to talk? The question is an unfortunate necessity, because often the answer is “no”. Our conversations are shrinking and hushed things. Our voices—the differing pitches forming a euphoric contrast—weary with a history that we share, an inheritance of silence that runs deeper than the testosterone that now courses through my blood. But occasionally our muted whispering lights up with the sparks of genuine human connection (sudden laughter, a moment of dorky enthusiasm, the sound of her toddler daughter’s voice—soft and sweet, shy—in the background).
Those moments led me to a truth: that, though vastly different, both the lives of these women and my own curl from a shared historical line.
I was a daughter, I say to my therapist, and am stunned into silence by the truth of it, how much it explains of me. And lately, it is a truth that I can’t stop thinking about. I think about it when I listen to the news and hear that, in 2024 so far, in the so called “lucky country”, a woman has been killed on average every four days. I think about it when I hear the names of the five women killed in the attack at Bondi Junction in April (I say them under my breath: Ashlee Good, Pikria Darchia, Yixuan Cheng, Dawn Singleton, Jade Young), and when it is reported that during a wave of national protests calling for action against gendered violence, the ex-partner of WA woman Erin Hay is charged with her murder.
Maybe, at last, change will come. But maybe not. I can’t be sure. All I can be sure of is this: women are fucking amazing. And though I am not one, I am incredibly proud of the history that we share.
A similar sentiment is at the core of Matrix. It is fundamentally a celebration of women; Specifically of female wisdom, made literal by the “visions” experienced by Marie. In the description of the first of these visions, language that is decadent and richly evocative blooms like colour from the page, as sudden and overwhelming as a thunderclap:
“Lightning sparks in the tips of her fingers, swifter than breath it moves through her hands, the flesh of her arms, her inner organs, her sex, her skin, and settles jagged and blazing in her throat.”(Chapter 1, 04:09-04:20).
While Marie attributes such visions to the Virgin Mary, the otherworldly figure that appears “wears the face of her own mother”(Chapter 1, 05:40), and when the vision fades, Marie finds herself “in a ring of her own daughters.”(Chapter 1, 06:07). While the exact cause of the visions is not made clear, what does become apparent is that with the bending of reality, the maternal line does not break. Indeed, it reappears, intact, woven through the rest of the book, and the reader need only turn a few pages before encountering some variant of the words “mother” or “daughter”.
Throughout the novel, the nuns retreat further and further from the rest of society. Under Marie’s instruction, the Abbey is fortified by the construction of a labyrinth through the forest, and all men are exiled from its grounds. While in today’s context, this narrative might seem to reinforce the rigid essentialist rhetoric of “man-hating” feminism, which gave rise to the TERF movement, a la J.K. Rowling, we must read Matrix as what it is: a breathtaking piece of historical fiction written to embody the reality faced by women in the 12th century.
The women in my life continue to astound me. They are women with eyes of steel, painted nails and hands that never tremble. They are women with a love for their daughters so blisteringly intense that I almost can’t bear the heat that radiates from it.
I celebrate these women every time I rub my hand in awe over my stubbled chin. I celebrate them every time I trace an ecstatic arc with a dumbbell curled towards my torso, every time I absently lay my palm against my top surgery scar and feel my heart beating just beneath the surface.
Matrix is a celebration of the history that these women have passed down to their daughters, and that I, too, have inherited. It is a celebration that transforms a history riddled with gaps, silences, into one fissured with crystal.
Note
Voicestamps from Matrix, Lauren Groff audiobook, 23/09/2021, Language: English
Penguin Audio Whispersync for Voice-ready
May 4, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
meditations with passing water
Jake Goetz
Rabbit Poetry
Reviewed by HOLLY FRIEDLANDER LIDDICOAT
It’s a sophisticated piece of work that imparts its subject matter through its form. This is what I distinctly remember from first reading Jake Goetz’s ‘meditations with passing water’, in one sitting, in 2018, and what still rings true on re-reading five years later. The opening lines flow and hum like currents—lines jut out from left to right, lap at page edges, then recede. Their layout instantly brings to mind gentle river waves. This flow-form continues throughout, a steady constant.
flexing against sky
ripples of sun and cloud
knead through greens
and browns
(3)
‘meditations with passing water’ is a series of four long poems that chart experiences of the Maiwar (Brisbane River). It is not an exhaustive history. I’ve often referred to it as a book-poem in four parts, but Jake has just as often disagreed with me. In both ways, the poem-parts connect to share the river’s stories—focusing on contemporary experiences of the Maiwar, juxtaposed with British colonisation and its enduring legacy for both the traditional custodians, primarily the Jagera and Turrbal peoples of the Brisbane catchment, and others that live at its shores. As a Sydneysider living in Brisbane at the time of writing, Jake explores the river’s ‘mutterings’ by using the psychogeographical concept of dérive, undertaking many unplanned journeys through the landscape and juxtaposing these with text from scientific textbooks, found texts, newspaper articles, texts on First Nations and colonial history, and John Oxley’s 1823 Governor Report.
As a title, ‘meditations with passing water’ captures the book’s essence. If you get a chance to hear Jake read from this work, his aural performance adds further depth—the gentle, slow readings of each line lull you along the river, where you are buoyed by sound and feel. The form underpins the meditative feeling—the narrator is always meandering along the river bank, watching, “a group of Kiwis swimming in T-shirts / smoking cigarettes” (4), “each apartment Coles pram-pushing mother” (7), “two bottles of XXXX / covered in mud” (13). River as meditation. Walking along river as meditation. Sound of lapping water as meditation.
Yet the idea of a river’s meditative calmness is juxtaposed with meditation’s truest aim—the making of mental space to find deeper meaning. What does a river do? It feeds. It houses. It runs. It stagnates. It floods. It dries up. It sustains and kills fish. It dreams. It divides. It’s the graveyard for trolleys, bodies, tires, oily mess. “it carries / the syntax of the city / on its back (30).” As a receiver of human decisions, it tells a thing about a psyche.
Jake finds our psyche by contrasting contemporary experiences of the Maiwar and its western archives. In the here and now, Brisbanites jog along it; donut, jetski and boat on it; suicide into it; as plastic bottles bob forever alongside. Its is very Brisbane—through its named local heroes (Uncle Sam Watson, Darren Lockyer, David Malouf, (Ken) Bolton, a little (Liam) Ferneyian experience) and unnamed. Brand names are markers of ongoing colonisation and signal the omnipresence of capitalism—they are always popping up, always visible, mostly because they are literally towering over the river (Meriton, Santos, Telstra, Suncorp, Mercure, Marvel). The branding of housing (Mercure, Meriton) and “RIVERFRONT APARTMENTS COMING SOON” (32), “ZEN cranes meditating on apartments” (20) showing it’s all for sale. Company omnipresence grates uncomfortably against ‘corporate responsibilities’—for example the 2017 newspaper text reporting our once national darling, Qantas, letting 22,000 litres of toxic foam flow into the Maiwar.
for what is Brisbane as a river
but that man
holding a signed figurine
of Darren Lockyer
in his hands
Gold Coast bound on origin night
(21)
Contrasting this with historical markers, Jake returns to concrete form, carving whole rivers of negative space out of colonial archives. The balance of archival poetics with the everyday is what makes this book exciting and accessible to a contemporary reader. In the second poem-part, “Highgate Hill to Hamilton / The Flood of 1823”, Jake quotes from John Oxley’s early recordings of his ‘discovery’ of the Brisbane River. Textually, distinct images of tributaries are carved out of text blocks. These concrete images, over and over again, reinforce that this is a poem-book about a river. And then, throughout the section, the river overpowers language, the source text becoming harder and harder to read. By removing more and more words from the original text to create the engorged river-image, the historical narrative becomes corrupted by the river—the Maiwar charting its own course regardless, reinforcing its place.
As contemporary readers, we keenly feel the irony of the chosen text, the instability of western logic. “There was no appearance / of the River being / even occasionally flooded” (30). And yet in 1893, “Sunday morning in Brisbane never dawned / on so much desolation” (53). And then again, we now know, in 1974. 2011. 2022. With climate change and increased urban density, the risk of extreme flooding is likely to increase. History as teacher is being degraded, words harder and harder to read, the meaning murkier, the bottom difficult to see—“the negation / of knowledge / of progress / of the fixity of things” (29). As the greens turn to brown, we are threatened by our inability to see and act clearly—“a culture is no better than its woods (Auden)” (54).
the rise to work and fall as a city
that forms around across beneath
beyond yet
always from this river
(54)
To find ultimate meaning through meditation you must sit through the discomfort. Meditation is intensely challenging—your body hurts as you sit for long periods unable to move, your mind shrieks at you that you can’t do it, while sometimes being in the stillness releases all negative thoughts—and the point is to sit and breathe anyway. Like a sore body, the collection offers an uneasy feeling of place, “being from a nation / on a groaning earth / that fluctuates like an excess of alcohol / in the stomach” (6). Natural disasters are frequent, like the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef (10), cyclones near wrecking ships (27), “I don’t think people are aware / just how bad it is” (11). At the core of this, Jake struggles with what it means to live on unceded Aboriginal land. He moves between reportage about an Aboriginal flag painted on a major intersection as an angry response to gentrification (18), to records of the atrocities committed by early settlers, to asking if he, or “this” (poem?) has “ruined it”—the idea of “country as myth” (29).
That discomfort is metaphor for life, and meditation teaches that reconciling with that feeling is a path to freedom. This is the real heart of the book—that by delving into the discomfort/shrieking feeling of colonial impacts we can perhaps find a deeper truth. Perhaps a different way of engaging. Jake is not overtly didactic. But history is, if we allow it. The discomforting (more than discomforting) reality is the destruction our nation was built on, the myth like life buoy we settlers cling on to, and the destruction of climate that will relegate us to history if we don’t act fast and immediately. The Jagera and Turrbal people consider the Maiwar “the source and support of life in all its dimensions—physical, spiritual, cultural (Gregory 1996, p.2)” (Note on the text, 62). We must reconcile our relationship with Country, with climate, with First Custodians in order to (re)build a wholistic and ongoing life and a new relationship with this place.
Being with this discomfort, being open to change, to other ways of being. To deeply understand the intersections of the river and life, its interconnectedness, the looping in on time and space. The dreaming stories shared, how the first Mairwah (platypus) came to be. The polluting of the river that sustains us. Our complicity in our own destruction, as if we were above and beyond nature “a comfortable residence / smashed against the Victoria Bridge / like an egg in a strong man’s hand” (51). For all of the destruction the river has caused through flood, for all the destruction we cause it and its First Peoples, both offer us other ways of being (“the water was that clear / that we used to have a competition / to find the penny first in amongst the nice clean boulders”) (16). For the convicts that first arrived in Brisbane before Oxley, shipwrecked and lost, the Quandamooka people looked after them. Convict Thomas Pamphlett records that a local man stayed the night to “keep up the fire…” (60) and
nothing could exceed the kindness with which
we had been treated by the natives
who had lodged us in large huts by ourselves
and given us as much fish as we could eat
(61)
The ongoing generous, openhanded spirit of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country. Our ongoing failure to rise to the invitation of compassion, reconciliation, of truth-telling. Our slow rise and response to what Country, its rivers, are telling. For us to bring our water-particle bodies together as a course for change. ‘meditations with passing water’ does not offer us explicit answers—rather shifts through the Maiwar’s sediment, lays bare the layers for us to see, to feel, and to know.
HOLLY FRIEDLANDER LIDDICOAT has previously been published in Cordite, Overland, Rabbit, Southerly, The Lifted Brow and Voiceworks, among others. She’s edited poetry for Voiceworks and the UTS Writers’ Anthology. Rabbit Poetry published her first collection CRAVE, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Mary Gilmore Award. In 2022 she undertook a Bundanon residency and in 2023 her unpublished manuscript Doghouse was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Bequest.
May 3, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Open
by Lucy Van
ISBN: 9780648917601
Cordite Books
Reviewed by LUOYANG CHEN
Perth is getting colder and I am getting cold. I am on my way to get some jumpers from Target. Writing this review in my head while walking to the bus stop, I am thinking: This is great. I want to test the limits of this review like Lucy Van tests the limits of poetry in The Open.
With being open comes full disclosure. I disliked Van the first time I saw her. It was early in the morning roughly 5 years ago and it was a poetry lecture on Sappho and O-. For someone like myself who only started eating breakfast about 2 days ago, Van’s monotone was pretty awful, adding agitation to my already agitated mood. I needed something more engaging! As the semester went, I became intimidated by her. Then I wished I were her. And then it was me who cried hysterically in her lecture because of “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”(1), because of Bhanu Kapil’s lying nakedly on the ground, drinking peepees(2), and Ban(3), because of the context of bringing personal experience into reading poetry of others, because of the context of interpersonal and institutional racism. And then, as it went, Lucy sent me an email, offering unconditional support to someone who she barely knows. Because it was not an act of kindness but kindness of an act. I did not reply to her email though because I could not make sense of what it is like to be on the receiving end. Then it was The Open.
Gareth Morgan’s review (4) on the “sentence structure” (?) is pretty good. Angelita Biscotti’s take on “open relations”(5) is fantastic. And because they did that I am doing something different.
Van brings poetry into living, not life into poetry. In The Open, the poet-speaker (or Van herself) narrates stories of her lively interactions with friends, families, strangers, and literature. On the surface level, I would be lying if I say it is not tempting to categorise the book as a travelogue. Melbourne, Perth. Saigon. Wangi… But let’s pretend that it is a travelogue, then poetry is nothing but documentation of descriptions, representations, observations, and self-reflections. This is to say that the poet makes poetry out of their lived experience. This is also to say that life is the raw material for poetry. In this sense, poetry is pretty much dead. That’s cool. What is cooler, though, is that (I feel) that is not what The Open is about. If anything, it is about testing the boundary of poetry, about redefining poetry as a verb, about poetrising (not poeticising) life, about making poetry alive, about making poetry become life. To write better is to live better.
How to live better?
For example, one can start, like Van does in the first line that opens the first poem, Hotel Grand Saigon, by brining writing poetry present in the here and now. Van writes: “I have gone back and now I am here” (p.3). Where is she? She is “facing a lifeguard’s chair and a lifesaver” in “a colonial swimming pool” in Saigon. Where did she go? Did her mind travel back to Australia? This first line is genius for its simplicity with great intensity. Ambiguous colonial identity (i.e., being the colonial subject and object at the same time), power imbalance, privilege, guilt, trauma, violence, and history are unleashed in the act of going back and coming here. “I have gone back and now I am here” is vitally apostrophic despite not having an obvious “O”. One way to start living better is to be aware of the background, the system that makes now now and makes here here. But where does poetry have a play in this living? Well, to me, this way of living itself is poetry. It is meaningful. It is aesthetic. It engages with the world. It has at least a point of view, a voice, a poetic technique, a form, a sense of weirdness…
How to live better?
Van continues in sequence V of Hotel Grand Saigon, wherein she argues for the ethics of writing in her assertive NEVER. She writes, “Never write a poem about a boat. In fact, never translate and never use metaphors. Never use verse to pray for the sight of land nor record the anguish of typhoon season. This is when you leave because no one expects escape under these conditions” (p. 7). What more can I say here? Two things. One: do not write about experiences that are not yours. Two: even if it is your own experience, writing about it does not represent or transform that experience. Bombs are bombs. Typhoon is typhoon. Writing about this might make the writer and the reader feel better, but it can never negate the atrocity of the source of violence. Having said that, what Van does here is writing about not writing it. It seems like Van is unable to reconcile the paradox of this writing/living. However, if The Open is not poetry but life, or The Open is the redefinition of life as poetry, then it makes sense for Van to say NEVER. Because to say is to do. To say NEVER is to NEVER do.
How to live better?
In her interview with Cher Tan on Liminal, Van said that “tennis is a major structuring principle of The Open”. What is tennis? Van explains,
“Tennis has no time limit. The question, ‘When does the match end?’ makes no sense. Tennis just goes on. Like other things that are real, there is no limit. Except for violations. If you have a problem with this, you don’t like the good tennis” (p. 39).
The Open is tennis! The Open is full of violations. For example, Van uses the real names of the real people. This is a violation of privacy. Another example, Van is an Aussie traveller who does “nothing for [her]self because the workers do everything for [her]” (p. 7). Last example, the life/poem is narrated in Australian English. None of these is Van’s choice. And yet. And yet, understanding these violations and the attempt of trying to reconcile these violations are present throughout the moments of life. And because I have no problem with this, nor does Van, The Open is a good tennis, good poetry, good life.
I want to return to Van’s kindness, to my interactions with her. We never really spoke in person. In fact, we barely message each other over social media. To some extent, I am still intimidated by her. From another angle, I feel like she is a kin to me. But this is pure fantasy and imagination and it is full of this “I”. Van would probably think: What the hell. But consider this a violation.
Notes
1. This is a poem by Ocean Vuong.
2. To share the bodily experience of what it is like to witness and then experience racism in her childhood (i.e., a white-supremacist youth used to wake up very early in the morning so he could urinate into the milk bottles of Bhanu’s Gujrati and Kenyan neighbours), Bhanu Kapil drank her urine in front of a live audience at Harvard University in 2015. A recording of this performance can be found on YouTube
3. Ban is Ban en Banlieu (Nightboat Books, 2015), a body-poetry collection by Bhanu Kapil.
4. Gareth Morgan’s review titled “Shitheads: well are we doing this” was published in Overland Issue 245 Summer 2021.
5. Angelita Biscotti’s review titled “Open Relations” was published by Liminal on 30 November 2022.
LUOYANG CHEN currently lives on the unceded Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. Flow (Red River/Centre for Stories, 2023) is his debut poetry collection. He has another poetry manuscript and is currently writing “Who Live More”. He was born and raised in Fujian, China.
April 30, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Breath
by Carly-Jay Metcalfe
ISBN 9780702268359
UQP
Reviewed by LIZ SUTHERLAND
Breathing was one of the few things in life I took for granted. Until I was 20, out with pneumonia for four months, three fractured ribs from excessive coughing. Then again at 32, post-COVID coughing for three months, two fractured ribs that time. Sickness and disability have a way of reframing things we otherwise consider inevitabilities: breathing; life.
Metcalfe establishes the tone for her bodily experience of Cystic Fibrosis (CF), and of the relentless heartbreak of losing friends to CF, at the outset of Breath. As a reader, I’m scraping into ‘stiffly laundered white sheets’ (5) with her as she wonders if these same hospital bed covers were recently the shroud of a child who’d just died. A morbid thought I push to the back of my mind anytime I walk the halls of a hospital. Places where people, lovers, significant others have died. Will die. Metcalfe reminds us of our mortality in the same breath as calling out the West’s culturally ingrained fear of death and dying.
‘The only thing promised to us in life, is death’ (211).
This inevitability, and our cultural reticence to witness it, is the pulse of Metcalfe’s memoir and her broader vocational drive. She doesn’t shy away from the impetus of her career and life choices: how they’ve been shaped by her experiences with CF and everything the illness created in, and stole from, her life. Where her fragile human body experienced intense and prolonged trauma and grief, came out the other side, survived. Against all odds, when others did not. Survived, but at what cost?
‘Some kids held on for weeks, while others only took a few days, but the end result was always the same: we were left breathing out our guilt in their absence’(17).
Breath centres on a lung transplant Metcalfe received at the age of 21, oscillating forward and backwards through time. She wields memory as a literary device and plays on subjectivity, flicking between past and present tense and timeframes, sometimes within the space of neighbouring sentences. At times dizzying, it’s articulated with self-awareness of how memory melds and warps with time: ‘I have a knack for opening jars of memories, but these moments are often trapped with an eternal present, and I can’t reconfigure them into a memory because they are so pervasive’ (34). Metcalfe struggles with forgetting: she can’t.
She expresses her ‘catalogue of traumatic events’ (11) as almost viral. Clinging tightly to her cells and nerve endings and brain paths as the decades pass. It may have been easier if she were able to fall into self-protective amnesia like some of the people in her life. But as her experiences with CF were grounded in the visceral, so too were her memories sutured deep under the skin.
‘Over the years, a faint memory – of surgeons pushing through skin, muscle, and fascia, and cutting through the strata of my chest until they strike bone – grows into something more tangible […] What happens in our lives writes itself into our flesh. There is wisdom in the body – a deep wisdom that beats its way through your blood. The body remembers’ (94).
Metcalfe’s memoir truly shines when she relates this pervasive, almost viral nature of living with CF to that of COVID and HIV. When she speaks of COVID from her perspective as an immunocompromised person, it is hard to ignore the mass disabling event that has created another layer of fear of death and dying. Where governments worldwide in the 2020s have decided that the economy is worth more than people, especially disabled and immunocompromised people, governments of yesteryear made the same calculations with queer people, sex workers, and people who inject drugs. Metcalfe compares cancer in the early 1980s with AIDS, similarly stigmatised and misunderstood. The kids with cancer were housed in cubicle A of Turner Ward, a ‘trinity of linoleum, stainless steel and suffering, it was a waiting room for death within the Royal Children’s Hospital’ (12), whereas the kids with CF stayed in cubicle E. This ghostly estate forms the backdrop of much of Metcalfe’s memoir. A spectral character in its own right. The harsh words of doctors clogging up its arteries. Dying children’s struggling breaths inflating its lungs. In speaking with a doctor who worked with people with HIV/AIDS on Oxford Street, Sydney in the 80s, Metcalfe realises their survivors’ guilt are kin.
‘We were talking about how many CF friends I’d lost, and he shared his own experience of collective and cumulative grief from losing hundreds of people in his community’ (177).
But where there is mutual understanding in some ways, Metcalfe seems to pull away from the possibility of camaraderie. Referencing Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Metcalfe refutes the universality of the concept of a “before” and “after” illness. Her experience is that of being born into illness; born into a constant state of grief and resilience. This does lend her to being uniquely qualified to write this book, but I found myself frustrated that connections of this nature weren’t explored more fully, despite, or even due to, what set them apart.
As Metcalfe herself notes: ‘sickness has a way of making people seem less banal and far more interesting than they actually are’ (128). Though balancing the personal with the political or social in memoir is a tightrope act that rarely executes a perfect performance, I wished she went deeper into her own and other philosophical beliefs and mythologies around death and histories of CF and other chronic illnesses. There are moments when she leans into tangential storytelling as a reprieve from the self-contemplative nature of memoir, linking the personal to the other. These reflections are fleeting, however, and tend instead towards the rhetorical.
I recognise, though, that it’s in the personal that disability justice and medical advocacy becomes most effective. Metcalfe transmutes her survivor’s guilt into action by bringing to light some of the many facets of receiving medical care in this country. She recounts cavalier and callous medical professionals, many of whom were doing their best under a system of budget cuts and not enough staff. Some of whom resorted to eye-rolling and dismissing her pain post-op. Others who tactically and maliciously abused her and other CF children.
Metcalfe undoubtedly traversed harrowing and traumatic terrain over the course of her life thus far, and reading even a glimpse of it engenders an affinity for her perspective. Where I struggle with personal disability advocacy, however, is when it veers into violent illusions and exclusionary language. At times, Breath feels insensitive to the situations of other people, using them as metaphorical fodder to get the point across: ‘Ollie and I drove to McDonald’s, then we stopped at a lolly shop where I scraped half a kilo of diabetes into a brown paper bag, before driving back to Ollie’s where I ate like a starving refugee on his bed’ (66). Comments like this, and others centring around fatphobia, were difficult to read as a disabled person with a history of eating disorder.
It struck me as odd in a memoir about death literacy, disability justice, and advocating for organ donation, that Metcalfe at times eschewed specificities in lieu of generalities. I wished that she’d taken readers on her interior investigations into why she occasionally defaulted into using well-trodden and discriminatory phrases to describe something about her life. Questioned what it is that draws to the plight of people fleeing genocide and persecution to illustrate a personal experience? Even in our advocacy, we must still be aware of how our nation has treated people of refugee status for decades, and how our society and medical industry treat fat and disabled people. But none of this should be taken to minimise the impact that Metcalfe’s Breath will hopefully have on public opinion and public health systems as they view and relate to those with chronic illness and disabilities.
‘More than once, I’d felt the breath of my friends’ departures, the timbre of their spirit winding down, the sad predictability of history repeating’ (5).
Despite its limitations, Breath is both a love letter and a call to action. Honest, lyrical, raw, and moving. It remembers the ones who died too soon, and reminds us to embrace this body, this life we have right now. Because we never know when this breath we take for granted will be our last.
Works Cited
Metcalfe, Carly-Jay. Breath. UQP, 2024.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
LIZ SUTHERLAND (they/them) lives on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Liz is studying a Master of Arts (Writing and Literature) at Deakin University, is the COO of a nonprofit organisation, and recently joined the Board of Overland. They were a finalist in the Pearl Prize 2024 and the 2023 OutStanding LGBTQIA+ Short Story Awards. Their writing has appeared in the Hunter Writers Centre Grieve Anthology, the Wheeler Centre’s Spring Fling event ‘Stripped Queer’, ScratchThat Magazine, Into the Wetlands Poetry Anthology, at Q-Lit festival events, and more.
April 28, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Leaf
By Anne Elvey
Liquid Amber Press
ISBN 9780645044966
Reviewed by JENNIFER COMPTON
Anne Elvey was recently shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award for one of her elegant, prayerful compositions, that hardly seem to be composed of words as we know them, and yet I suppose they must be. They lift up off of the page, they seem to linger in the air.
Don’t get me wrong, I was very taken with all of the shortlisted poets, as I hunkered down on Zoom, and any one of them could have won and I would not have been disgruntled.
But I was so taken with the flavour and intent of Elvey’s work, all over again, that I returned to re-read and reconsider her 2022 collection Leaf. This is a handsome book issued by Liquid Amber Press, the brainchild of Pauline Brightling and Rose Lucas, whom I can only suppose had a rush of blood and decided to test their relationship and work very hard, whilst ripping up $10 notes, bedazzled by something ineffable.
So, I am coming at this book for the second time. And this time through I pause to dwell on the epigraph from John Charles Ryan’s book Plants in Contemporary Poetry. Because, after all, a poet would not go to all the trouble of choosing a suitable epigraph, and seeking permission etc, unless they trusted their choice would illuminate the thrust of the book and guide the reader.
‘How do we imagine plants? How might plants imagine us?’
Indeed, it may even have been the spark that lit the tinder that set the fire of imagination roaring. Because immediately, in ‘Part 1 To listen for the leaf’, in the first poem ‘Leaf’, Elvey sets about the task of addressing, if not answering, these questions.
you touch from inside’s
other vein and skin
silver
to a spot of rust smooth
to the swell of an insect’s
egg held in fingers
breath
becomes a word
(p3)
The necessity of breath, which the leaf understands, as it converts light into sustenance into oxygen, again and again and again, is acknowledged and honoured. An ancient pact, a symbiosis, almost, indeed, a cabal. And there is a kind of psychometry in this first section, as if hands can hear, as if hands had another sort of ears that listen for and to the unsayable, that can know, ‘beyond the break and repair of language’ what is not unknowable.
Ask what
answer your hands should
give. It is time. It is time
they listened for the leaf.
(p12)
And so, the preamble done and dusted, Elvey sets to work in “Part 2 The dark industry of life” amplifying the musicality of the daily round. In “Artefact” the wooden table contains hidden messages. It’s just a matter of knowing where to stand in the angle of the light to decipher them. And in ‘Taking leave of no. 5” the trees are condemned, the landlord is adamant. But do you listen when they tell you not to look back? No, you don’t. Not when you are imbued with a reckless generosity and also like to keep a sanguine eye on circumstance. The times. How do they do? Do they do well? Do they do ill? And how does the weather, the soil, and every other constituent of the macrocosm? Take your lesson from the tree. Take advantage.
A tree takes
gives. Prudence
means nothing
to a tree.
(p22)
The book swirls on through ‘Part 3 Luring water’ and ‘Part 4 These knuckles’ welt on wood’ and ‘Part 5 Not to spoil the well’ with a limpid and supple assurance, ‘like a liquid handling a thing.’ Or, like a walking meditation, which is the next best thing to prayer. As if prayer is doubting and hoping in equal part whilst moving mindfully. In ‘Leaf and tumble’, which I find to be the apotheosis of this book, and which I happen to know was the poet’s preferred title, comfort is sought, out in the natural world, within its blithe imperatives and its deep and deepening mysteries.
Did I imagine the whispered
intent, the certainty of my ground
as way to go, the tether
of limb to trunk, until I could
no longer suppose you were
or are? My feet unrooted
from earth, what answer comes
to my tentative cry? Without
a word wind lifts
again. Leaf tumbles.
(p45)
Elvey’s craft is gentle and! astute. She untethers her mode of enquiry from antique certainties and shibboleths to, as it were, begin again. To see afresh what can be seen and to understand, feelingly, what can be understood. To ask questions that, as of yet, cannot be answered.
From ‘Under the rotary clothesline’
Reaching for a peg
I wonder how might
I have looked
to another
(p67)
JENNIFER COMPTON is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. She lives in Melbourne on unceded Boon Wurrung Country. Recent Work Press published her 11th book of poetry the moment, taken in 2021.
Carielyn Tunion-Lam (she/they) is a writer, videopoet, educator, and cultural worker. She has worked in the arts & cultural sector, the community services sector, and has experience using creative strategies in grassroots community organising.
