In the question time at a poetry session of this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival a member of the audience complained that ‘most modern poetry’ is deliberately obscure, doesn’t use rhyme or rhythm, and is generally not reader-friendly. He might have had Joanne Burns in mind: apart from infrequent commas and an occasional dash or semicolon she mostly eschews punctuation, she rarely writes metric verse (presumably what the questioner meant by ‘rhythm’), she uses big words, makes frequent reference to other poets and (in this book at least) religious arcana, and she often wanders down trails of seemingly random association. But, you know, spend a bit of time with her poems and chances are you’ll come away feeling oddly refreshed.
For example, the third of amphora‘s seven sections, entitled ‘streamers’, is described in a subheading as ‘a series of koannes’. I imagine everyone knows what a koan is – or at least, like me, knows that ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ is one. Almost idly, I went to Google to check my initial assumption that ‘koanne’ was an alternative spelling. Apparently not, said Mr Google. Then I realised that the word was a playful invention, combining the poet’s first name with the zen challenge to the rational mind: so the reader is given fair warning to expect some kind of idiosyncratic almost-sense, not to struggle to make sense, but to let the non-sense play around in one’s brain. Some of them work brilliantly:
you miss the bus
before it arrives how easy
to change the lightbulb
(Incidentally, the lack of punctuation here doesn’t really cause difficulty; it just slows the reading down.)
I found the whole book engaging, but it was the second section, ‘soft hoods of saints’, that spoke to me: a Catholic child’s perspective on stories of the saints nostalgically recalled, overlaid with adult erudition, mashed up with high and low cultural references and approached with a wry, mostly affectionate, probing intelligence. From ‘haggle’:
saints show us who we aren’t. impossible to imitate. our prayers too fast. impatient. saints and their trust in their god. slow and endless. wearing belief like soft hoods. invisible protective. we can only gawk at their images, legenda. in the holy cards many saints are accompanied by floral arrangements. flowers. do saints have flaws. once they are officially saints surely all flaws must hit the floor to be swept away in the giant hagionic broom
This is fun, but something serious is happening as well.
My blog posts about the books I’ve read don’t pretend to be responsible reviews. If you want to read an excellent, exploratory discussion of amphora, I recommend Martin Duwell’s review posted on 1 June this year.
J M Coetzee has a very fine article in the 29 September issue of the New York Review of Books. Titled ‘The Angry Genius of Les Murray’, it has lots of insight into what makes the poetry so good …
Murray is not a poet of the inner life. Instead he relies on an acute sensitivity to sensory impressions and an extraordinary capacity to articulate them.
… plenty of guidance to new readers on where to start, some lucid explication of the cultural context, and a judicious account of Murray’s troubling bitterness. It ends:
The time has perhaps come for Les Murray to let go of old grudges. Now in his seventies, he has received many public honors and is widely acknowledged to be the leading Australian poet of his generation. His poems are “taught” in schools and universities; scholars write learned articles about them. He claims that he is read more abroad than at home. This may or may not be so. But even if it were true, he would not be the first writer to suffer such a fate; and it’s a better fate than not being read at all. If there are a handful of purists who for political reasons will have nothing to do with him or his works, so much the worse for them—the loss is theirs.
Sylvia Johnson has made occasional pseudonymous appearances in the comments section of this blog. A couple of weeks ago she wrote asking if I’d like to read her novel, which she was expecting from the publisher any day. Never one to knock back a freebie or an invitation to be in the in crowd, I said I’d be delighted. The book arrived on my doorstep an hour before I was due to go to the airport for a long flight, so it joined Raimond Gaita’s After Romulus, incongruously I thought, in my carry-on bag.
I guess Watch Out for Me is a genre book – a psychological thriller. The Woods children – Hannah, Richard and their little sister Lizzie – spend a couple of weeks each summer in the 1960s at Bradley’s Head on Sydney Harbour, playing in the park, exploring the disused lighthouse and racketing around the abandoned tunnels with other summer visitors. One year, the Year Everything Changes, their family takes in their cousin Toby, about the same age as Lizzie, who has been traumatised by the erratic behaviour of his mother (shades of After Romulus!) and is timid, careful and eventually traumatised all over again by the teasing games of the young mob. That world of free-range childhood with its exhilarations and terrors is wonderfully evoked, including a tense moment of dawning eroticism in the pitch black of the tunnels. Then something terrible happens in the park, and the children’s dramas are caught up in a bigger, nastier drama.
The summer of 1967 is told from a number of points of view, some of them recalling events four decades later, when the US President is visiting Sydney amid a high security alert. Two other narratives unfold in this other time – in one Lizzie is besieged by an anti-Western mob in a North African town, in the other Hannah and Toby are meet again in Sydney for the first time since that pivotal summer, and it gradually becomes apparent that something creepy and dangerous is going on around them – something even worse than the brutishness of the US security forces and the strident commentary of the radio shock-jock (who, incidentally, played a disgusting role in the 1967 story). These stories, which turn out to have other links besides the ancient history, unfold to properly scary, operatic climaxes.
And there’s a fourth story, told entirely through clippings from the British press: the story of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian man who was shot by police in the aftermath of the London Underground bombings in 2005. These clippings add a kick to the book: the Woodses’ story is fiction, and you might read it just for the thrill, but de Menezes’ was killed in the real world, and its presence makes the Woodses’ story seem more pressing. In After Romulus Raimond Gaita says he is convinced that people are moved by his father’s story because they trust that he ‘tried to tell it truthfully and that it is truthful’. I think the press clippings have a similar effect here: they act as a kind of pledge from the author that in her imagined story she is trying to tell something truthfully, that the account she gives us of the world is truthful.
I’m not suggesting an equivalence between this book and anything by Raimond Gaita, but my two plane books did speak to each other seriously, and I think Watch Out for Me succeeds in being persuasively, chillingly truthful.
As the title suggests, this is a follow-up to Raimond Gaita’s Romulus My Father and as the cover suggests this time there’s a focus on his mother.
There’s an essay on the process of turning the book into a film, surely be among the most emotionally charged essays of its kind, made all the more poignant by the author’s repeated, convincing assertions that he works hard at avoiding sentimentality. I can’t imagine a better antidote to the world weariness of Radio National’s Movie Show or the consumerism of Margaret and David. The emotion isn’t anything as trivial as authorial pique. This is about passion: according to Gaita, Richard Roxburgh didn’t want to become a film director, he just wanted to direct this film, and the description of the moment when Gaita finally meets Kodi Smit-McPhee, the actor who plays young Rai in the film, comes like a thunderclap.
But that’s just one of five essays. There are two pieces more or less in the manner of the earlier book. One (‘A Summer-Coloured Humanism’)deals with Hora, his father’s close friend and almost a second father to young Rai, and the other (‘An Unassuageable Longing’, the longest essay and the book’s reason for existing) with Christine, Gaita’s mother, who was seen pretty much from his father’s point of view the first time around. Raimond Gaita probably couldn’t write a shopping list without at least alluding to philosophical profundities, and his writing about these two towering figures from his childhood is richly philosophical. But he saves his main philosophical powder for the other two essays, ‘Character and Its Limits’ and ‘On Truth and Truthfulness in Narrative’, in which he expands on and corrects some of the philosophy raised in Romulus My Father or in responses to it. He reflects on his father’s moral behaviour and sees in it the source of key elements of his own philosophical thought.
‘Philosophy always needs to be read slowly and more than once,’ Gaita writes.’ I would happily read these pieces several times, which is also true of his A Common HumanityandThe Philosopher’s Dog. I can’t say that I follow his thinking all the time, but I do trust him. What appeals to me most strongly is the way he roots his philosophising in experience: there’s a deep sense throughout the book of each human being as unique and irreplaceable, and of thinking as embedded in a human life.
Some of the philosophy is hard to grasp, but I found it tantalising rather than annoying. He distinguishes between obligation and moral necessity, between affection and desire, between moral inflexibility and moralism, between sentimentality as the cause of error and as the form of the false. He writes of the importance of serious conversation, of the way people who share a life can fail to understand each other, of the difficult feat of responding to someone who suffers ‘the utmost degradation’ with ‘compassion that is entirely without condescension’.
I read this on a long plane trip. There was something wonderful about reading his careful, deeply felt ruminations on the importance of honouring a child’s need to love and honour (in this case) his parents, even when they have betrayed his trust, and the harm done by disdaining the parents of such a child while the young man next to me had Will Smith waving a gun around on his laptop and the woman on the other side was alternating between a book of sudokus and Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
I’ve read many of these poems before, in Mulberry Leaves (Paper Bark Press 2001) and The Goldfinches of Baghdad (Flood Editions 2006). But they all feel new to me. This may be because I’m a lousy reader of poetry. It may also have something to do with this book’s careful ordering of the poems into something like a sequence (most evident in the middle and third of the three sections, the former playing obliquely with the mythic figure of Eurydice, the latter consisting entirely of poems named after birds). And it may have to do with the nature of the poems themselves: bear in mind that I know very little about poetic schools and movements (I wouldn’t know a Black Mountain poem from a New York lunch), so anything I say is sure to be crude and/or naive, but it seems to me that Adamson’s poems flow into one another: edges and boundaries blur, as he and the Hawkesbury River, birds and fish, and other poets and artists, all intermingle in a strangely compelling, elusive oneness.
When he read at Sappho’s recently, Adamson remarked in passing that he generally doesn’t know what his poems are about until he’s finished writing them, and often not even then. I’ve heard a couple of people recently say that a lot of contemporary poetry is like cryptic crosswords – it’s largely a matter of unravelling complex codes etc etc. I don’t think that’s what Adamson is talking about. I don’t have the book with me so can’t give examples (I’m at the airport), but time and again a poem will move from a vivid description of a bird and the speaker’s interaction with it; a metaphoric or even allegorical meaning, sometimes with satirical will be set up; and then it’s as if the poem gives up such ventures as futile and we’re left with the bird, the river, the silent poet.
I recently heard a passage from a recent novel read on the radio, beginning, ‘The Hawkesbury was lovely.’ It’s hard to imagine Adamson writing that sentence, or going on to talk about its golden cliffs as the novelist did. Adamson’s poetry doesn’t describe the Hawkesbury. It lives it. My flight is being called.
Having enjoyed the movie Red Dog in spite of its near erasure of Aboriginal people from the Pilbara, I was glad to turn to the Book Group’s pick of the month for a bit of counterpoint. Sadly, I turned to it too late to finish it before the group met over soup, bread and cheese on 17 August. So here we are, reversing the usual order of my Book Group posts: first the meeting and then the book.
The meeting: We had a good turn-up, and more than half had read the whole book. All but one of us were big fans, and the dissenter – who was about a third of the way through – was prepared to keep an open mind. I’d read only 110 pages or so myself, but at that point was finding it exhilarating. Discussion was animated, emphatic, mostly good humoured. I won’t try to summarise beyond saying that there was a shared sense that the novel made us see the British settlement of Western Australia with fresh eyes. Also the whaling industry, but I hadn’t read to that point, so tried not to listen. I had read the short chapter where a convict who has been speared by Noongars in payback for wrongs done by someone else – though smarting with the injustice, he understands that it’s necessary for the whites to accept the payback without further retaliation if there is to be peace in the small settlement. In terms of the plot, he feels like a powder keg waiting to explode, but I love Kim Scott’s open hearted portrayal of him as a complex individual (as opposed, say, to the equivalent lower-class ‘bad whites’ of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River). No one would engage with me on this line of discussion because they didn’t want to give the plot away – true gentlemen every one.
The subject of Red Dog was raised, and those who’d seen it were even less impressed than I was, regarding the praise lavished on it by Margaret, David and Julie as symptomatic of misguided and misleading advocacy for the local product. We had brief but sharp differences of opinion about The Slap (Christos Tsiolkas) and The Riders (Tim Winton), and some disparagement of The Unknown Terrorist (Richard Flanagan) and the literal minded TV adaptation of Cloud Street (Winton again).
I came away looking forward to the rest of the book.
After the meeting: I took nearly two more weeks to finish, but that’s no reflection on the book. (See previous post for partial explanation of my reduced reading time.) While I was reading it I heard on a podcast of the Book Show that Melbourne University currently doesn’t offer a course in Australian literature – one enterprising student has organised monthly lectures by poets and others who are willing to talk for free (apparently without input of any kind from the academic staff!). One justification for this state of affairs is that students in general think Aus Lit is boring, conservative and ‘white’, so the course wouldn’t be popular enough to justify itself. I guess this is what happens when the profit motive holds sway in education. But, stepping down from my media-generated-outrage soapbox, I’d have to concede that That Deadman Dance does make some other much-praised Aust fic look fairly timid and vanilla. It tackles the same general area as Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers: the first, hopeful contact between Aboriginal Australians and white invaders and the seeds of the subsequent tragic genocidal history. Where Clendinnen wrote history, excavating the journals of early settlers in Sydney to reconstruct a hypothetical account from the point of view of the Indigenous Australians, Kim Scott tells what his narrator calls a ‘simple story of Bobby and his few friends’ about the settlement in south west Western Australia, confidently taking us into the minds of black and white, young and old, male and female. I’d be surprised if he hadn’t read the Clendinnen book, but it’s very much its own work: joyful, funny, superhumanly broad in its sympathies, challenging, vivid and in the end heartbreaking.
The central story tells of Wabalanginy/Bobby, a Noongar man born after the arrival of whites, who finds friendship among the new arrivals, studies them, at times acts as an intermediary, is virtually adopted into a white family but remains firmly connected with his Noongar community. He’s a brilliant character – admired as a clever mimic by the whites and held in awe for his artistry in song and dance by the Noongars. His engagement with both cultures is enacted beautifully: a number of times we’re taken inside his way of perceiving and responding to the world in wonderfully lyrical writing.
At one stage, the desecration of a grave is described as ‘deliberate and careless all at once’, a phrase that resonates like a gong through the last, darkening chapters, when the logic of capitalism and colonialism asserts itself, and we gradually lose any sense of the inner lives of the settlers as they become more completely incomprehensible to Bobby and appear to forget the almost reasonable relationships of the recent past: deliberate and careless, intentional and oblivious.
Maybe one day even the hallowed halls of Melbourne University will encourage its students to read this, and other books that will help them wrap their imaginations around the history they inherit.
Pathetic, that’s me. But just to keep some kind of action happening on these pages, here’s a snap from my local supermarket which is a bit of an object lesson in the importance of line breaks.
I really thought they were offering a new kind of schnitzel made of calves’ hearts (urk!) until I saw the similarly worded ad for beef schnitzel with the line break after ‘beef’.
My friend Swapna Dutta is a writer, translator and editor, mainly of children’s literature, who lives in Bangalore, in southern India. The School Magazine published some of her stories when I was editor, and she and I have kept in touch over the intervening years. Swapna mentioned in a recent email that she had translated a children’s book, The Arakiel Diamond, from Bengali into English, and asked if I’d like a copy. Of course I was interested, and a couple of days later it arrived in my letter box, with three other books. It’s been a treat and an education to read all four.
Swapna Dutta and Geeta Vadhera, The Sun Fairies (National Book Trust, India 1994, 2001)
The Sun Fairies is a tiny picture book that plays around with science and fantasy. That is to say, it’s a fanciful account of the origin of clouds – some fairies who live in the sun build castles in the sky so it won’t be so bare and empty – that ends up being a decorative but accurate account of how the water cycle works: the cloud castles are made from water, air and dust, and when they get too heavy they fall to the earth as water. The fairies have discovered ‘a never-ending game’. The illustrations, by Geeta Vadhera, are fabulous. I see from the Internet that Ms Vadhera has gone on to international renown. This may be her only children’s book.
Swapna Dutta, Plays from India, illustrated by Baraan Ijlal (Rupa & Co 2003)
In some ways each of the other books is a work of translation. In Plays from India three episodes from Indian history are shaped into dramas suitable for performance by school students. In my ignorance I don’t know whether the stories would be familiar to most Indian students, so I can’t tell whether the history or the theatre is the main point. I was interested in both.
Swapna Dutta, Folk Tales of West Bengal , illustrated by Neeta Gangopadhya (Children’s Book Trust 2009)
Folk Tales of West Bengal retells sixteen tales. Swapna has an article at papertigers from which I learned that what the Grimms were for Germany, and Moe & Asbjørnsen for Norway, the imposingly named Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar was for what is now Bangladesh and West Bengal. At least some of the tales here were collected by him in the first decades of last century. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has entered the woods of Re-enchantment, there’s a lot in these stories that’s familiar to a reader brought up on European-origin fairy stories: kings and princesses, talking animals, metamorphoses, riddles, lost and found children, supernatural beings who reward the humble and punish the greedy. There’s also a lot that’s different: the heroine of the first story, for instance, is not a seventh child but a seventh wife. This blending of familiar and unfamiliar makes for a delightful read.
Sucitrā Bhaṭṭācārya, The Arakiel Diamond, translated by Swapna Dutta and illustrated by Agantuk (Ponytale Books 2011)
The Arakiel Diamond is the only book in my swag that is not Swapna’s original work. It’s a detective story for young readers, one of a series featuring a Bengali housewife and her niece. A wealthy man dies. His most precious possession, the eponymous diamond, has gone missing, and almost everyone in his household – and there are many – has had motive and opportunity to steal it. The plot has exactly the twists you’d expect, but the detectives’ relationship and the details of their domestic life are well captured, and I learned a lot about the Armenian community in Calcutta, in a way that reminds me of grown-up detective writers (Sarah Paretsky comes to mind) who take us to a new subculture in each novel.
The four books had me reflecting on multiculturalism in children’s literature. We make fun of the way US children’s publishers, apparently believing that their intended readers would shrink from anything not immediately recognisable as of the US, re-edit books from elsewhere in the English-speaking world to remove unsightly exotica. They don’t just want a world where British characters spend dollars and cents, or Australians walk on a pavement, weird as such a world might be. I remember hearing of a New Zealand novel whose publisher suggested the book’s Maori issues might be more accessible to US children if the setting was changed to California – that author held firm and the book still found readers, even got made into a movie.
I wish now to acknowledge that I’m a bit of a kettle to the US publishers’ pot. Though I enjoyed the slight cultural disorientation I felt as I read these books, I caught myself thinking young readers would be put off by it. To make the books accessible to Australian 11-year olds, the unexamined internal argument went, you’d have to do something about lakh and crore, lunghi, salwar shameez and rakhi, not to mention the nitty-gritties of the game of chess or a casual use of thrice in conversation. On reflection, I think that argument profoundly misunderstands how young people read. The only thing that universally distinguishes young from adult readers is that the young ones are younger. One result of this is that they know they don’t know everything about the world, and mostly when they read there are words they don’t recognise but have to guess from the context. (I loved and understood pulverise and invulnerable in Superman comics long before I could define them.) So you might not know what a lunghi is, but the context tells you it’s an article of clothing, and there’s even an illustration to help. Likewise, lakh and crore are obviously big numbers, and that’s all you need to know. As I remember back to my own childhood reading, I think such things would have added spice to the book: if I was young now, I might even have fun googling them. As for nitty-gritties and thrice, I do think we can trust young readers to recognise when a word or a turn of phrase belongs to a different place. (Both my sons say zed in spite of seeing quite a lot of Sesame Street when young.)
Two literary events with the Art Student in the last week: Robert Adamson and Devin Johnston at Sappho’s on Tuesday night, and Tom Cho and others at Penguin Plays Rough on Saturday.
I’ve been to one previous poetry reading at Sappho’s, in May this year. On that occasion Rhyll McMaster and the open-mikers read from just inside the shop, to an audience spread comfortably on the verandah and courtyard in the balmy evening, enjoying warm drinks and tapas. Tuesday night was a bit different, bitterly cold (by Sydney standards) with rain pelting down. We arrived early enough to claim the sole remaining indoor table, opting for dryness and comparative comfort behind the microphone rather than huddling in the chilly and dripping plastic-roofed and -sided balcony with good sight lines. The courtyard was completely out of the question. When the Talent arrived, they were given tables in the semi-exposed area, tables that we had rejected because they were awash.
It speaks volumes for the pulling power of these poets that the space, though small, was crowded. Adamson and Johnston were an excellent double bill, lots of river water and birds from two continents. The two stand-out poems for me were Johnston’s ‘Marco Polo‘ (the link, which needs Flash, has DJ reading this poem and two others) and Adamson’s ‘The Kingfisher’s Soul‘ (this also needs Flash), which he told us he’d written in response to his wife asking why he never wrote any love poems: it is indeed an achingly personal love poem.
Adamson, Johnston and their small entourage departed – presumably to a warmer, drier, better fed place – before the open mic, along with enough others to create the impression that all who were left were the open mikers and their pals: ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Dregs of the Evening’. But we soldiered on, reading one poem each. There was a long piece in terza rima that I couldn’t quite hear, a pantoum, a sharp witty observation on cockatoos, a tribute to Francis Webb, and to conclude the evening next month’s featured poet Eileen Chong gave us Mary Wollstoncraft addressing her unborn daughter, praying that one day her fingers would close around a pen. And somewhere in there I read a sonnet about snoring. To polite applause. Come to think of it, even the most excellent poems of the evening received only polite applause. Given the weather, that was about all that could be expected.
Penguin Plays Rough had a very different feel. It was my second time there as well, but my first at the new venue. The front section of an old warehouse has been curtained off from what I assume is the living space further back. The heavy red curtains lend a suitably theatrical atmosphere to the chequered lino floor, cosily ill-assorted couches and armchairs around the walls, and wooden podium with iconic red chair and standard lamp. By the time we arrived all but one of the sears were taken, and no mercy was shown to our elder status. We found a place on the lino. (At the first break in proceedings when we stood up to stretch our legs, I was shocked to discover a pack of young people moving in to claim the space we were relinquishing – behind us, in the tiny space between the front door and the first heavy curtain, they had been standing three deep, envying us our vantage point.)
We were physically uncomfortable, but we were warm, and we were part of a cheerful crowd. Many people were drinking mulled wine. Those in the know – and they seemed to be many – had brought their own mugs. Pip Smith, who edited and published The Penguin Plays Rough Book Of Short Stories, was a brilliant MC, using words like ‘awesome’ and generally exuding a mi casa es su casa aura. With one possible exception (he said humbly), the readings were terrific. The advertised readers were Emma Dallas (a character sketch of an inner west personality), Ryan O’Neil (a piece about depression that would have been scary if it wasn’t so brilliantly playful), Sam Twyford-Moore (a tale of travel, crosscultural romance and writerly rivalry), Jess Bellamy (letters to celebrities whose dysfunction feeds the tabloids, which became retrospectively more substantial with news of Amy Winehouse’s death yesterday), and the star of the evening Tom Cho. Tom read from ‘The Attributes of God’, a story that will be in a book he describes as being about the meaning of life. I wouldn’t have minded the physical discomfort of the evening anyway, but hearing this story would have been worth even more suffering. ‘God is love’ has taken on new meaning for me. He ended with a YouTube clip of otters that, far from being gratuitously cute, was a perfect accompaniment to his story.
Penguin Plays Rough doesn’t have an open mic. They do have ‘wild cards’: anyone can sign up at the door to read, and a selection of those who sign up are interspersed between the advertised readers. On Saturday we had an essay on relationships between the genders with a focus on schoolyard handball, a piece that Pip Smith described as a theatre review written by James Joyce … and me.
Yes, I put my name in the ring again, which I wouldn’t have done if I’d realised that PPR is actually a short story event and I only had a couple of sonnets and a dog poem in my pocket, and even more definitely not if I’d known I was going to be at the end of the evening – after Tom Cho and the otters. Astonishingly, the whole audience stayed put and even seemed to enjoy what I had to offer.
These are the first two times I’ve ventured to read in public. It’s not so bad.
Added later: I forgot to mention that I met Adrian Wiggins there, the mover behind the Sydney Poetry web site. He has uploaded some wonderfully atmospheric photos to facebook. Mercifully he had to leave before Tom Cho’s and my moments in the chair, so we don’t appear, except in the background of one of the shots.
[Note added in 2021: the links in this blog post are all broken, except for those in journal title above, and the cover images, which still work for subscribers to the Asia Literary Journal.]
The cover image of Aung San Suu Kyi and the accompanying line ‘The Lady in Waiting’ announce that Asia Literary Review No 19 has a focus on Burma. The halo behind her head may seem to suggest a cheerful postmodern irony, but none of the irony, and very little cheerfulness, penetrates beyond the cover. The only appearance of Aung San Suu Kyi is an interview, effectively an extended sidebar to ‘The Generals’ Celestial Mandate‘, a grim account by Bertil Lintner of the world’s oldest continuous military dictatorship. The lady in waiting’s statement that there is great hope because so many young people are joining the democratic movement is like a tiny ember glowing in the horrendous darkness of state murder, incarceration, torture, and corruption. The Burma theme is continued in a number of pieces. Jack Picone’s ‘Planet Pariah‘ is a photo essay on life on the Thai-Burma border, where refugees, mostly Karen, live perilous and sometimes heroic lives. Incidentally, it brought home to me what an inspired piece of television SBS’s Go Back to Where You Came From was – having seen the reality TV version of refugees struggling to survive in a country that hasn’t signed on to the UN Convention, I found it easier to absorb information presented here in a more traditional mode. ‘Surveillance‘, a short story by Devan Schwartz in which the protagonist is broken in as an agent of the military, reads as a compassionate commentary on the former Burmese intelligence agent currently in the news in Australia (‘Maybe they kill 100 or 150 because I order them to do that. It’s not their fault, my fault. If they didn’t kill, they get killed too‘). There are poems by a political prisoner known only as Jimmy and by Ma Thida, a writer now practising medicine in Rangoon who has previously spent six years in prison.
Things don’t get any more frivolous when the journal moves away from Burma. In the photo essay ‘Qi Lihe’, Stephen J. B. Kelly explores the plight of impoverished Muslims driven from the increasingly arid countryside of northwest China to a scarcely less bleak life on the outskirts of Lanzhou. John Evans’s ‘Blood Money‘ is an ebullient but desperate tale about professional kick-boxers in Korea. In Meira Chand’s story ‘The Return‘ a young man comes home in disgrace from employment in Hong Kong that had been his family’s hope of financial salvation. These pieces contain a lot that’s rich, but it’s a grim world they inhabit.
Hsu-ming Teo’s ‘Fables of a Fractured City‘ departs from the pervasive grimness. The city of the title is, delightfully, Sydney, ‘the most Asian of Australian cities’. The fractures of the title are the four points of the compass, but also the disjunction between mainstream and Asian perceptions of the city: is the south to be represented by Cronulla, notorious for the 2005 riots, or by the fabulously multicultural ‘temple-land’ of the south-west?
Just as I’d finally got around to reading issue 19, issue 20 arrived in my letterbox. Having made the former wait, the least I could do was move the latter to the top of my teetering bedside pile. The image of a broken Godzilla toy lying amid debris with the line ‘Tales from Japan’ gives an accurate account of its content. All but roughly 20 of roughly 200 pages are related in some way to Japan.
Perhaps the most interesting items are those that deal with the March earthquake, tsunami and nuclear threat. Jake Adelstein’s ‘The First Responders‘ is a fascinating account of the role the yakuza played in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and the history behind their surprising (to me) civic responsibility. While government agencies were locked in bureaucratic straitjackets the criminal organisations moved swiftly and efficiently to bring aid and maintain order in shelters where there were reports of violence and sexual assault (a yakuza organisation sent 960 ‘peace-keeping’ members across the nation, while the National Police Agency managed 30 officers). Masaru Tamamoto analyses the government’s failure to respond flexibly and effectively in ‘Conformity, Deference, Risk Aversion: Parsing Japan’s CDR Complex)’. In ‘Reaction to Disaster‘, a manga-like comic by Sean Michael Wilson and Michiru Morikawa, a British resident of Southern Japan tells his story.
There are two short stories set in the aftermath of the earthquake – by authors described at the back of the book as a ‘Singapore-born American novelist’ and a US expat who has ‘lived most of his life in Japan and Thailand’. I felt uneasy about them, as if it might be too early for fiction-writers to exploit these terrible events without disrespect being part of the package.
Other stories and poems move away from the recent news: a crosscultural relationship blooms and dies beneath the cherry blossoms and the fires of Obon; the great poet Basho has an inconclusive encounter with a young woman, also as the cherry blossoms fall; a man is slated for ‘voluntary’ euthanasia in a dystopian future; a depressed and overworked nashi farmer falls in love with a bird.
As this is an English-language journal, it’s probably not surprising that very few of the writers are Japanese – just Masaru Tamamoto, the poet Akiko Yosano (1878–1942), whose ‘Four Poems from the Kanto Earthquake of 1923‘ are perhaps the high point of the journal, and the poet Gina Barnard, who may not be the only mixed heritage Japanese writer here, but she is the only one who makes it her subject, which she does powerfully. Most of the other writers are from elsewhere in Asia or are North American or British writers who are living in Japan or have lived there. (Featured artists and photographers, on the other hand, are mostly Japanese, not the least of them being manga artist Michiru Morikawa.) The best known presence in the journal is novelist David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, who is interviewed by James Kidd. The interview addresses possible unease about this preponderance of outside voices:
Having set many of his stories in Asia, from Japan to Korea, China to Mongolia, Mitchell is understandably sensitive to charges of Orientalism. I ask whether he has ever had any reservations, political or aesthetic, about writing in English about Asian culture. ‘I worry now,’ he replies. ‘At the beginning of my career I was too young and ignorant. I read Said’s Orientalism in my early 30s. I remember thinking, “Jesus, this guy would hate me and my books.” But still.’ Today, however, he improvises a response to Said’s hypothetical objections by posing a succession of counter-questions about his ‘right’ to imagine cultures other than his own. ‘Why do you have to be Asian to write about Japan? Why can’t I have a protagonist who’s my age but Japanese? Isn’t there a reverse racism if I say, “I’m white, therefore I have no business writing about non-white people”? By the same rather crap logic, no novelist from India or Pakistan or Africa or even South America has any business writing about the British – an untenable argument leading to a mutually uncomprehending world, right?’
It’s an issue that Asia Literary Review can be seen to grapple with constantly. With the temporary demise of Heat, though, it stands out as a publication in our region that has a deep platform of cultural diversity. I feel my horizons expanding with every page.
In the question time at a poetry session of this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival a member of the audience complained that ‘most modern poetry’ is deliberately obscure, doesn’t use rhyme or rhythm, and is generally not reader-friendly. He might have had Joanne Burns in mind: apart from infrequent commas and an occasional dash or semicolon she mostly eschews punctuation, she rarely writes metric verse (presumably what the questioner meant by ‘rhythm’), she uses big words, makes frequent reference to other poets and (in this book at least) religious arcana, and she often wanders down trails of seemingly random association. But, you know, spend a bit of time with her poems and chances are you’ll come away feeling oddly refreshed.
