Tag Archives: Omar Sakr

SWF 2023: My fourth day

Posted on 29 May 2023 | 6 comments

Friday was my day for poetry, starting early:

10–11am In Conversation: Anthony Joseph

Anthony Joseph comes from Trinidad and is currently based in the UK. He was in conversation with Felicity Plunkett, one of the few Australian poets to appear on the program. Though his most recent book of poetry, Sonnets for Albert, won the 2022 T S Eliot Prose for Poetry, Felicity Plunkett assumed, correctly in my case, that the audience was unfamiliar with it, and filled us in: it’s a book, mainly in sonnets, about the poet’s father.

The conversation covered two main subjects, both engrossing: the story of Joseph’s father and his use of the sonnet form.

A young friend of mine once said of her father, with obvious affection, ‘He was a terrible dad.’ Joseph could go further: ‘He was my father, but he wasn’t a dad.’ He married very young, and left the marriage after just enough time for two sons to be born, then in the rest of his life had ten more children by a number of women. Joseph’s brother remained bitter about being abandoned until, at the very end, he was at his dying father’s bedside. Joseph himself lived with his paternal grandmother as a small boy and her affection for her son rubbed off on him. The poems, as I understand it, explore this emotional complexity. I’ve bought a copy of the book.

The sonnet – which Felicity Plunkett described as being an inheritance just as much family experience is – is more than a poem. In the English-speaking world, it’s a feeling, a thing you recognise in many places: in the shape of a pop song, even in the shape of the human body. It’s a way of thinking. For Caribbean/Black poets, it’s interesting to find ways of using the form and making it fit their experience. When he was writing the book, Joseph started out adhering strictly to the rules, but then began taking all sorts of liberties. His father’s voice said to him: ‘You can’t put me in this box.’

He quoted two Caribbean poets. Kamau Braithwaite: ‘The hurricane does not roar in pentameter.’ Derek Walcott: ‘The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination.’

Speaking of himself, he said that luckily he has access not only to standard English but to Trinidadian Creole, which (I’m almost certainly getting this wrong) uses English words with African-derived grammar. To illustrate, he read us sonnets from the book in standard English and in Trinidadian.

There were some good questions. I loved his description of his process for writing a poem: ‘You write it. You leave it. You come back and edit it, and hope the original resonance is still there.

After grabbing a late breakfast, it was off to join a much larger audience for:

12-1 pm Eleanor Catton: Birnam Wood

Eleanor Catton was in conversation with Beejay Silcox who I know mainly as a critic in the Australian Book Review. Everyone keeps saying that Eleanor Catton’s new book, Birnam Wood, is her second, the first being the award-winning The Luminaries. Catton was careful to let us know it was actually her third, and that she didn’t disown her first, The Rehearsal, about a theatrical production in a girls’ school.

She talked about her venture in screen writing – for the 2020 movie Emma. (full stop is part of the title), directed by Autumn de Wilde. She learned a lot from her immersion in Jane Austen’s novel, and from the way film requires character to be revealed through action. She learned the dictum that every story had to have a beginning, a middle and an end was important for drawing attention to the transitions between those elements, the turning points of structure.

She and Beejay Silcox agreed that Emma is one of the great monsters of English literature, but she said that the genius of Jane Austen is to beguile the reader into committing the same mistake as Emma makes, in thinking ourselves morally superior to her, and then turning it back on us. (I do love a bit of Jane-Austen-ophilia.)

As for Birnam Wood, it sounds interesting, a satire that sets out to unsettle readers of all political stripes. I’ll wait for recommendations or otherwise from the Emerging Artist and others. Maybe I’m unsettled enough already.

Then scurry scurry scurry (I’m sure in the olden days when everything was better there was a bigger time gap between sessions) to:

1–2 pm ABC RN: The Bookshelf

The Bookshelf is an ABC Radio National program where hosts Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh chat with guest writers about their books and the books they cherish. Each episode of the program adds a number of books to an imagined bookshelf. Their guests on stage for this session were Shehan Karunatilaka (I was glad to see more of him after Wednesday evening), Jason Reynolds (interested to hear him more discursive than on Thursday evening) and speculative fiction writer Grace Chan (yay for genre!).

One of the pleasures of this panel was the way it embodied Anthony Joseph’s quote from Derek Walcott: ‘The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination.’ An African-American YA writer, a Malaysian-born spec-fic writer, a Sri Lankan novelist, all own the language and its literatures. I did make notes of the books they mentioned, but I’ll just mention a couple of moments that gave me joy.

I loved it when someone mentioned a book I love. Jason Reynolds mentioned Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog, a tiny book about a boy who writes poetry that I had forgotten until he reminded me of it. Grace Chan recommended Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho, saying that it had magic, and boarding school etc, and then referred, not to the obvious inspiration but to the late, great, beloved of me, Diana Wynne Jones. Shehan Karunatilaka was cajoled into confessing his love for the Choose Your Own Adventure books – it’s not that I loved them so much as that they were a feature of my early parenthood, and somehow it was a thrill to realise these formidable people were young enough to be my children.

Drums got a mention. Jason Reynolds quoted James Brown (I don’t remember the context): ‘Every instrument is a drum.’ Shehan Karunatilaka said he loved to play the drums: ‘I bang the drum, read some Yeats, and I’m ready to go.’

The most interesting moment was when one of the facilitators suggested that these writers of non-Anglo background were redefining the canon. ‘No,’ said Jason Reynolds. ‘We have different canons to start with.’ He listed a number of great African American writers, not as favourite authors of his, but as the eminences who defined the literary landscape. He suggested that each of the others on the panel had a similar lineage behind them. We’ve come a very long way since my days studying Eng Lit under the shadow of F R Leavis (even though that shadow was fading in my time), when there was The Great Tradition – a very short list of The Writers Who Matter. I for one am very happy for that distance.

7.30–8.30 pm The Rhythm of the Word

The thing I love most about the Sydney Writers’ Festival is being read to. The Big Read, when half a dozen writers would read to a packed Town Hall is now apparently a thing of the past, but moments like Sebastian Barry bursting into song at the beginning of his reading are still with me years after the event.

So I was happy to venture back out from my warm home for this poetry reading. Poetry readings at the SWF used to have a home-town feel, and when the festival was beside the Harbour poetry had a base in small, often crowded, sometimes glare-filled room at the end of the wharf. The Carriageworks doesn’t allow for such nooks and crannies, and poetry events have somehow become rarer.

Not that there was anything unattractive about this event.

Western Sydney poet Omar Sakr was the host. He used his platform as MC to slip in a poem of his own (the only poem I heard at the festival by a Australian living east of the WA border!). It was ‘Diary of a non-essential worker’ a Covid poem, and I wrote down two lines that struck me. I can’t read my own writing, but I think the lines are:

Everything is a miracle when you're alive
I'm learning that reluctantly

Madison Godfrey did a reprise of ‘When I grow up I want to be the merch girl’, which they read on the opening night. Their other poems were ‘Harry Styles was [illegible] on a beach and the horizon was aligned with his thighs’, ‘Utopia translates as no place’ (a heartbreak poem), and ‘Impulse’ (named for a brand of deodorant).

Joshua Whitehead, Canadian First Nations scholar and poet (a different person from novelist Colson Whitehead who is also a guest at the festival) did a stunning performance of a medley of poems from his two books, including Making Love with the Land (2022). If you heard his astonishingly rapidfire stuttering delivery on a recording you could easily assume his effects were achieved by electronic feedback but he did it all.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai read three poems, first in Vietnamese and then in English. At the end, she gave us a short lesson in the importance of diacritical marks in Vietnamese (‘those funny little marks above the letters’). She had us all pronounce Quế , and explained it means ‘cinnamon’. Then she taught us Que (which is how her English-language publishers) wanted to print it). It sounds quite different and means ‘snake’. Point made.

Anthony Joseph read two poems, quite different from the sonnets of this morning’s session. They were ‘On the Move’ and ‘The Ark’ He introduced the latter saying it was an elegy for a London hip hop performer whose name I didn’t write down. It’s a list poem, or a litany: name after name of African-heritage writer or singer or performer with the recurring phrase ‘is on the Ark’. The cumulative effect is powerful – for me, partly by making me aware of how few of the names I recognised (making me think back to Jason Lester’s observation this morning about different canons), and partly by invoking the force of those I do recognise (from Langston Hughes to Maya Angelou). At the end his friend’s name was added to the list, and Omar Sakr came onstage wiping his cheeks and saying his face had melted.

After the reading I looked around and saw just one face I recognised. We had a chat, and were soon commiserating over the absence of Sydney’s usual poetry audience from the event, and the near absence of Sydney or even eastern Australian poets from the Festival program. We happened to walk past Ann Mossop, Artistic Director, and buttonholed her briefly on the subject. She said that it’s hard to find an audience for poetry. I wonder what would happen if the Festival commissioned someone like Magdalena Ball of Compulsive Reader or Toby Fitch, poetry editor of Overland and organiser of Avant Gaga, a monthly poetry reading in Glebe, to curate a poetry stream in a tiny room somewhere at Carriageworks. If such a curator needs t be someone who’s not white, what about Eileen Chong, or Sara Mansour of the Bankstown Poetry Slam? Just wonderin’.

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Journal Blitz 10

Posted on 24 October 2021 | Leave a comment

‘Blitz’ is a misnomer. My progress through my backlog of subscribed journals has been at anything but lightning speed. One of the journals has gone into a troubling hiatus, which has had the silver lining of reducing my pile of obligation, but I’ve filled the gap with a couple of one-off purchases, so the pile continues to grow at least as fast as I can read. The reading itself, of course, is largely a pleasure.

Jacinta Le Plastrier (editor), Australian Poetry Journal Volume 10, Number 2: tribute, observations (2021)

For this issue of APJ, Jacinta Le Plastrier commissioned 29 poets and poetry-connected people to choose a poem by another poet and write a response to it and to the collection it appeared in. It’s a terrific idea. Much as I love Francis Webb’s description of a poem as ‘a meeting place of silences’, I’m delighted by this project’s invitation to read poems in the company of other thoughtful and engaged readers.

The resulting collection of poems and ‘commentaries’ lives up to the hope. Jan Colville’s poem ‘Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium’, for example, was chosen and commented on by Kristen Lang, whose book Earth Dwellers I loved. The poem is a response to a collection of herbs made by Emily Dickinson when she was a girl. It begins:

words slip off the page 
paste_ more than a century old 
_____ barely there_  cracked with age
_ and still
_____ here is the light through the forest
_____ her young hands 
_____ choosing stems, bare feet 
_____________________ in the dirt

Kristen Lang’s commentary sheds light and warmth even from her first words:

It is difficult to force a gap between the name ‘Emily Dickinson’ and the word ‘poet’. [This poem] not only prises the two apart but embeds there the warmth of an absorbed and absorbing child. There’s a contagious tenderness in this poem …

After a few more words that (for me) open the poem right up, she describes the book it came in – Journey (Walleah Press 2019). I immediately put Jan Colville and that book on my To Be Read list.

The rest of the poems vary richly in form, tone and content. There are poems by award winners and by people you’ve never heard of; poems by people whose work I love and have blogged about and people whose work is thrillingly new to me.

The commentaries are just as varied – including close, but not too close, readings like Kristen Lang’s; intensely personal prose poems; scholarly abstraction; and general advocacy for particular kinds of poetry.

There’s a translation from Bahasa Indonesia: ‘Termination Letter’ by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated by Tiffany Tsao, whose commentary on translation as creative collaboration is fascinating.

There’s a bilingual poem, ‘BIGGER THAN SCHOOL STUFF’ by Arrente poet Declan Furber Gillick, accompanied by the poet’s note on the incomplete poem as ‘a glimpse into the process of language revival’, and then a commentary from Jeanine Leane, who edited the anthology in which it appeared, Guwayu – For All Times (Magabala Books 2020).

As a lively, challenging and enjoyable introduction to the thriving, multifaceted contemporary Australian poetry scene, this would be hard to beat.

And then there are items that aren’t part of the main project, including an essay on poetry and science by Alicia Sometimes, tributes to Melbourne poet Ania Walwicz who died in 2020, and a blurb on Poetry Sydney, an independent literary organisation founded in 2019.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 240: Activism (Spring 2020), with links to the articles at overland.org.au

Here’s Adrian Burragubba on the alliance between Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous environmental activists in the context of the Stop Adani campaign:

Wangan Jagalingou’s case overlaps with the fact that large numbers of Australians oppose the Adani mine, and want it stopped.

The positive is that many people also support First Nations rights, and are joining forces with us. They know that by standing with us they can help protect the Galilee Basin, the natural springs, the Carmichael River. We welcome them. The negative is that support for our rights is not extended unconditionally and may therefore evaporate when the common goal is no longer an issue …

This is dangerous ground.

We call upon people to stand with us, but it’ll be our walk, our path, and it’ll be under our circumstances. 

That’s from his essay ‘When I speak I speak for the land‘ in this issue of Overland. It’s one of a stunning line-up of First Nations voices from the Activism @ the Margins Conference held in February 2020 at RMIT in Melbourne. Others range from Warlpiri story-teller Wanta Jampijinpa (‘Say sorry to the land‘) and longtime activist Puralina Meenamatta Jim Everett (‘An open letter to the next generation‘), to historian Victoria Grieve-Williams (‘Oodgeroo: Breaking the iron cycle of settler colonialism‘) and Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, whose ‘An Epistemic museum for modernity‘ calls for the thinkers and writers who legitimised white supremacy and slavery to be ‘identified, tracked down and held to account’. Taken together, the articles amount to an impressionistic history of Australian Indigenous activism from the 1960s Referendum campaign and the Gurindji walk off from Wave Hill to Blak Lives Matter and Indigenous hip-hop.

As always this Overland has rich selections of short fiction and poetry, edited by Claire Corbett and Toby Fitch respectively.

The poetry section includes stellar poets Omar Sakr, Samuel Wagan Watson, Ouyang Yu and Pam Brown. Jessica L Wilkinson has a beautiful historical poem, ‘Loïe Fuller entertains M. and Mme Curie at Boulevard Kellerman‘, and Zenobia Frost’s prose poem ‘sandwiches‘ is a powerful narrative of the loss of a parent.

Of the four sort fiction pieces, ‘Here comes the flood‘ by Perth writer Belinda Hermawan stands out for me. It’s a complex impressionistic tale of growing up with anti-Asian racism in Australia.

Vern Field (editor) Island 158 (2019)

As with the only other issue of Island that I’ve read, this issue is lavishly presented, with glorious full-page colour illustrations throughout. In fact, there’s hardly a page that doesn’t have some kind of image or colour effect behind the type, which is not always an advantage when a reader with deteriorating rods and cones is reading in artificial light.

This issue has a focus on the climate emergency, which is definitely a Good Thing, though maybe because I’ve been reading and brooding an awful lot about that subject I found more joy in the non-themed parts of the journal’s mix of creative nonfiction, essays, poetry, short fiction, excerpts from novels, and visual art.

Carmel Bird’s ‘Dr Power’s Prescription for the Fabrication of a Tasmanian Imagination’ is a nice piece of promotion for a work in progress, in which she discusses Colin Johnson’s largely forgotten historical novel Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the End of the World and its importance in the history of Australian, particularly Tasmanian, literature.

Angela Rockel’s ‘Rogue Intensities’ is an excerpt from a forthcoming work that gives us three months out of five years of ‘sensations and thoughts arising from a life in place’. Its combination of personal observation and scientific information about the flora and fauna of her place is full of charm, though I don’t know how I’d go with a whole book.

Dominic Amerena’s story ‘Just Maybe’ has just two full stops. The first comes at the end of a four-page sentence that loops back and forward in time telling a slightly creepy story of seduction from the seducer’s point of view. Then there are two words and the story is over. It’s like watching a juggler on a high wire: will he lose control and have innumerable clauses come clattering to earth?

I read Ken Bolton’s long poem ‘Letter to John Forbes’ with undiluted pleasure. Writing 20 years after Forbes’s death, Bolton identifies himself as a fan, and as a fellow poet. In semi-formal seven-line stanzas and a disarmingly informal tone, he brings the departed Forbes up to date on developments among their community of poets and in the world in general – our recent run of prime ministers, the careers of Forbes’s poetic friends and enemies, speculating on how Forbes would have responded. You probably need to know a bit about all that history to enjoy the poem, but it’s full of life and wit. Here’s a taste:

__________________________________ Our foreign ministers
___you'd have cherished – Downer & his air of stammer, of blithering,
Julie Bishop's show-pony, best-girl competence
 _ _(the earrings & tailored clothes), Bob Carr – how he rose 
___ to the occasion – & Rudd, after years of talking down to us, 
was about to, patiently, talk down to the United Nations. Look at me, Ma! 
They must've objected, or seen it coming.

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SWF 2021 Sunday

Posted on 4 May 2021 | 2 comments

Sunday was another beautiful late autumn day in Sydney, and another day of challenge and delight at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Evidently one of our ideologically driven weeklies ran a piece online saying the Festival was extremely ‘woke’, which is apparently a bad thing. I don’t know about woke but, as someone who nods off whenever I’m in a dark room, I was kept awake almost without fail. (The one fail was inevitable, in the after-lunch slot when I would have slept through an announcement that I’d been granted the gifts of immortality and eternal youth.)

10.30: Land of Plenty

This panel addressed environmental issues about Australia from a range of perspectives. Philip Clark of ABC Radio’s Nightlife did a beautiful job as moderator, giving each of the panellists in turn a prompt or two to talk about their work, and managing some elegant segues. The panellists did their bit to make it all cohere by referring to one another’s work. (How much better these panels work when the writers on them have read each other!)

Rebecca Giggs, whose Fathoms sounds like a fascinating book about whales, said that whales are a Trojan horse for a conversation about other animals’ relationships to humans. She described a moment when she was close enough to a whale that she could see its eye focusing on her – and only to learn a little later that whales are extremely short-sighted and there as no way that that whale could have actually seen her. What is actually there isn’t what we want to think is there,

Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu and co-author of Loving Country (about which more later) spoke about the difference between Indigenous and Western capitalist ways of relating to the land. Echoing Rebecca Giggs’s story of the whale’s eye, he said, ‘We look at animals and want to be friends with them, but as soon as a capitalist wants to be your friend …’ He begged us to take seriously the possibility of a reciprocal relationship with animals. Something terrible happened to humans, he said, when the combination of Christianity and capitalism happened. I think he has a book coming on the subject.

Victor Steffensen is a Tagalaka man from far north Queensland, author of Fire Country. Someone from my family had the privilege of doing some video work with Victor some years ago, and his stories from that time have given me a deep respect for Victor and his work in ‘using traditional knowledge for environmental wellbeing’, as the Festival site puts it. In this panel, he took off from Bruce Pascoe’s call for reciprocity with other animals, and spoke of relating to fire as a friend and not as something to fear. It’s about reading country, listening to landscape. His project of recording traditional knowledge that is in danger of being lost is not to archive it but to get it back into people, ‘to young fellas and then to the broader community’.

Richard Beasley, senior counsel assisting for the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission and author of  Dead in the Water about that catastrophe, said that the situation in the Murray-darling Basin had got so bad that ‘even John Howard’ did something about it. Howard’s legislation included clauses to the effect that whatever was done needed to be science-based. But then the lobbyists went to town, and in response to their pressure, politicians insisted that reports from the CSIRO were altered to suit the big capitalists’ agenda. His lawyerly rage was palpable.

There was a good question (a rarity at this Festival), about grounds for hope:

  • Rebecca Giggs: Thee’s hope. But you don’t get to be hopeful until you make yourself useful in some way – whatever your situation and abilities allow.
  • Bruce Pascoe: I have to think we can do it differently. We have to give our grandchildren a chance, not treat them with contempt. We need love of country, not nationalism.
  • Victor Steffensen: Language is important. [Sadly what I wrote from the rest of what he said was illegible. I think it was an elegant version of ‘Action is also important.’]
  • Richard Beasley: I’m a lawyer. I don’t know how to challenge any of this by law.

12 o’clock: Sarah Dingle & Kaya Wilson

We hadn’t booked this session in advance, but faced with a gap of a couple of hours, we spent one of our Covid Discover vouchers to buy rush tickets. Kaya Wilson, whose book As Beautiful As Any Other has the subtitle A memoir of my body, is a tsunami scientist and a trans man. Sarah Dingle, author of Brave New Humans: The Dirty Reality of Donor Conception is a donor-conceived person. Their conversation was aided and abetted by Maeve Marsden, host of Queerstories who was also donor conceived, though not anonymously through the fertility industry as Sarah was.

Sarah’s revelations about the fertility industry were nothing short of shocking. Not only is it monumentally unregulated, but records that might have allowed people to know what had happened to a particular donor’s sperm, even anonymously, have at least sometimes been deliberately destroyed. Couples using donated sperm have been systematically encouraged to lie to their children about their origins, leaving them unaware of any genetic predispositions to disease, let alone possible incest.

What Kaya told us about the systemic treatment of trans people was just as shocking. He said that he tended to keep his scientific life and his trans life separate. ‘In some ways they hate each other.’ But he has a chapter in his book that tries to reconcile them. The scientific literature, like legislation about, for instance, changing one’s ‘sex marker’ on a birth certificate, is shot through with assumptions that bear not relation to the reality of trans experience.

Both people spoke of the joy of finding themselves to be members of communities they weren’t aware of when young. When asked what they read for relief, both named writers I’ve loved: Sarah chose Terry Pratchett; Kaya chose Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous.

2.30: Bruce Pascoe & Vicky Shukuroglou

Loving Country: A Guide to Sacred Australia was an initiative of Hardie Grant Publishers, who approached Bruce Pascoe suggesting a follow-up to Marcia Langton’s guide to Indigenous Australia, Welcome to Country. Pascoe joined forces with Vicky Shukuroglou, a non-Indigenous woman born in Cyprus, who took the photographs and also contributed to the writing. The Festival website says that the book ‘offers a new way to explore and fall in love with Australia by seeing it through an Indigenous lens’. Daniel Browning, host of ABC Radio National’s Awaye, chaired this conversation.

Again, we were called on to love this country. The thing I loved about the session was the way the two authors could disagree. Bruce Pascoe, speaking of the horrendous bushfires last year, said that the disrespect for Country shown by authorities afterwards was in some ways worse than the fires themselves. We meekly accept the terrible destruction of heritage in the Juukan Gorge. We have to rebel as a people, he said, meaning all of us, not just First Nations people. Vicky Shukuroglou argued against the idea of rebellion, and spoke of the importance of conversations and of love: ‘If we’re going to talk about marginalisation, we first need to look at our humanity.’ From where I was sitting it didn’t look as if the two things were incompatible, but I was struck by the way as a non-Indigenous woman she was secure enough in their friendship and working partnership to challenge an Indigenous man. I would have liked to know more about what she had done to achieve that confidence.

The book, Pascoe said, is about how to restrain human go and let Country have a voice, He got Vicky to tell a story about a sick echidna that, without her realising it, had come to know and trust her, as a result – she thinks – of her being still around it over time.

We don’t need a black armband.
We just need to know the facts.
This is the country that invented society, bread and the Richmond Football Club.

4.30 pm The Unacknowledged Legislators

This was a great way to end my festival. (The Emerging Artist’s festival ended with the previous session: she thinks poetry and she don’t like each other.) Seven poets read to us, hosted elegantly by ‘writer, poet, essayist and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta’, Declan Fry. Here they are, in order of appearance.

Eileen Chong, whose poetry my regular readers will know I adore. She read five poems from A Thousand Crimson Blooms, which I’ll be blogging about soon. I was glad to hear her read the three part poem, ‘The Hymen Diaries’ after I had spent some time with it and checked out the artworks it refers to.

Maxine Beneba Clarke, poet laureate of the Saturday Paper, read three poems. I won’t report what they were because i wasn’t sure I heard their names correctly. One of them began, ‘When I say I don’t want to become my mother,’ and went on brilliantly to challenge the internalised sexism of that sentiment.

Ellen van Neerven read three poems from Throat (my blog post here), including ‘Treaty of shared power’ and ‘Such a sad sight’. The first-named is a play on the relationship between the writer of a poem and its reader that worked beautifully in this context.

Erik Jensen, reading to an audience for the first time, read six short poems from his first book of poetry, I said the sea was folded, a book that, he told us, is about falling in love and learning to be in love. He then read a poem by Kate Jennings, who has just died (this was how I heard the news) – and wept as he read it. He wasn’t teh only one to shed a tear.

Felicity Plunkett followed that hard act, reading four short poems from her 2020 collection, A Kinder Sea. The first, ‘Trash Vortex’, whose name tells you a lot, may be the kind of poem that Evelyn Araluen had in mind when she said artists have a responsibility to address the world’s urgent issues.

Omar Sakr read three poems, ‘Birthday’, Self-portrait as poetry defending itself’ and ‘Every Day’. This is the first time I’ve heard or read any of his poetry. I hope it won’ be the last.

Alison Whittaker, Gomeroi woman and a crowd favourite, read a piece that depended on knowledge of and (I think) contempt for ASMR, not that there’s anything wrong with such poems. She reminded us of the tragic reality of Black Deaths in custody and read a poem consisting of anodyne found phrases from court proceedings.

And my 2021 Sydney Writers’ Festival was over. There were at least four moments when someone on stage paid tribute to a parent in the audience or, in one case, on stage with them (and I’d left my run too late to see Norman and Jonathan Swan, and I probably missed other trans-generational moments). I didn’t see any of the international guests who attended on screen. It was a thrill to hear such a diversity of First Nations voices. I came home with a swag of books and a list for borrowing from the library. Hats off to Michael Williams and his team for making this happen in the flesh, and making sense of the slogan Within Reach: a living demonstration that the famous cultural cringe, while it may not be dead, has not much reason to live.

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Journal Blitz 4

Posted on 19 October 2019 | 2 comments

I subscribe to literary journals partly for pleasure and partly as an act of civic responsibility, and lately (only lately?) I’ve neglected to keep up with reading them. This is my fourth blog post in five months reporting on a catch-up read, starting this time with a journal I don’t actually subscribe to.

The Blak Women’s Brow Collective (Editors), Blak Brow (#40 of The Lifted Brow 2018)

Though I’ve heard plenty about the Melbourne-based The Listed Brow, this is the first issue of I’ve read – it came to me by way of the Book(-Swapping) Club.

When the editors of The Lifted Brow approached Paola Balla, whose bio describes her in part as a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman based at the Moondani Balluk Indigenous Centre at Victoria University, she ‘saw the opportunity to work collectively and went for it’ (the quote is from the journal’s editorial). Edited by a collective of Blak women – Blak, a note on the inside cover explains, was coined by artist Destiny Deacon in 1990, and names the lived experience and identity of urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples – Blak Brow has a strong collective feel, and is rich with voices speaking of the lived experience of Blakness.

There are strong individual voices: ‘Fight or Flight’, a wicked short story by Melissa Lukashenko; ‘Fern Your Own Gully’, a poem by Evelyn Araluen that savages the May Gibbsian version of the bush; ‘Because of You I Can’, a pair of short essays by poet Ellen Van Neerven and her mother Maria Van Neerven-Currie; ‘The Crucial Voices of Aboriginal Women’, an account by Celeste Liddle of the struggle to be more than a token Aboriginal presence on panel presentations.

But those are exceptions: while all of the voices here are strong and clear, most of them carry a sense of representing a constituency. The powerful first speech of Lidia Thorpe, first Aboriginal woman to be elected to a lower house seat in the Parliament of Victoria, is given in full. She captures the tone of most of the writing in Blak Brow when she says: ‘I have been inundated with messages from Aboriginal people across the country. I speak today on behalf of them.’ Even intense accounts of personal experience – ‘Binak’ and ‘A Room with a View’ – are followed by brief essays explaining that they are ‘composites’, the first ‘bringing together the real experiences of young women’ who have come under youth justice supervision in Victoria; the second, written by Vicki Roach, ‘a composite of [her] own and many other women’s lived experiences of finding housing when released from gaol’.

It’s a very rich collection of poems, song lyrics, fiction, art, journalism, scholarly writing, speeches to parliament and to a Federation of Community Legal Centres symposium, memoir, reports on art projects and academic ventures, and more. Some of it, as in the WAR response to attacks on their members, is very raw. As a middle-class white man in my early seventies, I was challenged, informed, delighted, and then challenged some more.

John Kinsela (guest Editor), Australian Poetry Journal 9.1: resist (2019)

This is a brilliant collection of poetry. John Kinsela, guest editor, says in his unusually long introduction:

We have a collective responsibility to live justly, and to work for mutual justice … , understanding each other, and respecting difference. Again, poetry is one of the most effective and linguistically affecting ways of achieving this. The poem as thing in itself is … a form of ‘agora’ in so many ways. Even very disparate issues of justice can find common ground.

The poems cover a huge range of ‘issues’ in a magnificent diversity of voices and poetic forms, and a strong sense emerges of ‘common ground’. As I read, I started out turning down the corners of pages I wanted to revisit and/or mention here, but soon gave up because there were too many – this blog post would have ended up as little more than a list. I’ll restrict myself to just a couple poems – passing over some wonderful poems in silence! (Oh well, almost in silence. Let me mention Evelyn Araluen’s ‘Mrs Kookaburra Addresses the Natives’, which like her ‘Fern Your Own Gully’ in Blak Brow, makes very funny and very unsettling use of language from May Gibbs’s children’s books; Eileen Chong’s ‘Rot’, on violence against women; Sarah Day’s ‘Nation’, on bullying; Dan Disney’s ‘let us rejoice’ an eerie mash-up of speeches by Scott Morrison and (I think) Hitler; Lisa Gorton’s ‘EKPHRASIS I. THE NYMPH OF FONTAINEBLEAU’, which juxtaposes an art critic’s comments on a painting with narrative about the exploitation that accompanied its creation; Jennifer Maiden’s ‘Umbrage in Vault Seven’, a current adventure of George and Clare; Jaya Savige’s ‘Spork’, on racism within a family. The list could go on.) I’m pretty sure that anyone interested in poetry or social/political issues will find something here that strikes a deep chord.

A little more detail on two moments in the collection.

The first is Toby Fitch’s ‘The Last Few Budgets in a Nutshell’. At a quick look this just looks weird. It begins:

Torquing about debt is always exshiting but
weaken nut and muscle knot becomb a carbone
cuppy of the Labna Putty.

The penny drops, and you realise that a politician’s speech (perhaps a particular one, perhaps a composite) has been tortured. There’s probably a word for this process: key words are replaced by words that sound something like them so that ‘Talking’ becomes ‘Torqueing’, ‘we cannot’ becomes ‘weaken nut’ and so on. For the reader then, there’s a double perception: we read the words on the page and hear the original. To do this and make it something more than just a bit of nonsensical clever-dickery is a challenge, and Toby Fitch pulls it off: those first lines give a whiff of the biting satire that he creates. This poem has stayed with me because its technique so beautifully captures and even generates the feeling one has when listening to political spin, and also perhaps a little because it makes me feel smart!

My second moment is call-and-response pair of poems by Kaitlen Wellington (‘It’s about time’) and Alison Whittaker (‘In response to Kaitlen Wellington’s “It’s About Time”‘) respectively. It took just a slight deviation from alphabetical order to have these poems appear consecutively (Rae White’s ‘Rainbow confetti pixels’ graciously allowed Alison Whittaker’s poem to nudge ahead of it in the queue).

‘It’s about time’ is very straightforward – the speaker goes ‘walkin old tracks’, reconnecting with traditional Indigenous knowledge, ‘lookin for some sarsparalla’:

Walkin, walkin
sticks, stones
dreamin track her, there
watch ya step.
We surrounded by the richest green,
earth's soil moist,
dry leaves scatter our path,
we are locked in our country's
secure embrace

It’s not just a bush walk, at least not what a seventy-something whitefella like thinks of as a bush walk. ‘A sea eagle is ‘lettin us know, / “It’s about time youse come walkabout here”‘. The final stanza begins:

We know what to do now:
unite, fight and teach.
Let our mob know
ain't no takin our culture away no more.

It’s a good poem. I was seduced by its idiosyncratic spelling, especially of ‘sarsparalla’, because that’s how we pronounced it in my North Queensland childhood – though we were talking about a softdrink, not a bush medicine. I could feel its seriousness, and then moved on … to Alison Whittaker’s response.

She begins with a question, ‘What does it mean to resist in this colony?’ and goes on to describe the cycle of necessary work – ‘in the courts of the public or in institutional tribunals’ – and necessary self-care. ‘I become a consistently self-optimising tool. In some ways, indistinguishable in discipline and form from that which I am resisting.’ Kaitlen Wellington’s poem brought the insight that there must be more than that cycle. She concludes: ‘What’s the point of making a nicer colony, when you can breathe sovereignty?’

This poem and this response to it offer something profound, not just for people who are the targets and survivors of colonisation and genocide, but to anyone up against any oppressive force. If you get a chance to browse this journal, do flip through to page 99 and read to the end of page 101. But don’t stop there.

Jacinda Woodhead (editor), Overland 234 (Autumn 2019)

This issue of Overland is bookended by two excellent articles from the Wrights.

Alexis Wright, in Telling the untold stories, begins with the problem facing writers in today’s increasingly chaotic world:

The question for the writer of stories is how to fight your way through imposed boundaries of indifference, ignorance, or political interests, and to perhaps learn how to do this by not getting directly into the ring and wrestling the pig ‘because a. it is only going to get dirty, and b. you will get dirty as well’.

and she relates this to the survival of aboriginal stories through the catastrophe of colonisation. It’s a magnificent essay, an excerpt from her Stephen Murray-Smith talk given in December 2018 (available in full online here).

Fiona Wright (probably only a very distant relation) writes about Tinder in State your intentions. Sometimes intensely personal, sometimes confidently snarky, this is a beautifully executed mosaic picture of what it is to be young and happily(?) single today.

Of the regular columnists, Tony Birch’s On thinking is the stand-out. Writing partly as a tribute to Deborah Bird Rose (my review of one of her books here), who died at the end of 2018, he quotes her:

Any conversation we humans may wish to start up concerning the living world, our place in it and our responsibility toward it must bear the knowledge of the terrible harms we have done and continue to do.

and pits that against Tony Abbott’s famous remark, ‘Climate change is crap.’

There are four pieces of short fiction – In Cassilis by Louis Klee, Buried time by Mykaela Saunder, ‘Into the valley’ by Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi, and ‘The melancholy new patriot’ by Corey Wakeling – introduced by Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, who at the time of publication hadn’t yet been announced as due to become joint editors of Overland late this year. There are just three poems, the place-getters in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, by Julie Jedda Janson,  Joel Scott and Ross Belton.

As well as these, there are articles on Cambodia (That bird is for us by Adam Curley, which takes an episode of something called Survivor as his starting point), Kashmir (Combat breathing by Tim Robertson), burning-off as a gross and destructive distortion of Aboriginal firestick farming practices (The fire cult by Katherine Wilson), current prejudice against Chinese people (Not all yellow and white by Gabriel Ng), and an essay on swimming pools and the beach that makes an excellent companion piece to the ABC doco series The Pool (Aqua Profonda by Gavin Scott).

The cover and moody internal artwork for this issue are by photographer Hoda Afshar.

I was going to include a review of Southerly 78.2, which I’m still reading, but if you’ve read this far I think you deserve a rest, so I’ll save that for the next catch-up blitz.

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Journal Blitz 3

Posted on 13 September 2019 | Leave a comment

Here are some notes from a third journal catch-up binge. One more blitz and I’ll be temporarily up to date.

Jill Jones and Bella Li (editors), Australian Poetry Anthology Volume 6 (2018)

This is Australian Poetry Inc’s sixth annual anthology of member’s poetry. The editors’ foreword begins with the question, ‘What could Australian poetry look like at the moment?’ and goes on to suggest that this anthology could be one way it looks. I love that refusal to be definitive. And I don’t envy the editors the task of selecting what turned out to be 64 poems from nearly a thousand that were submitted. Hard enough for me as a mere blogger to name poems that meant something to me.

I turned down page corners as I went (yes, I read – and mutilated – the hard copy, leaving the digital version unsullied on my desktop). Here are the poems with dog-ears:

  • Kevin Gillam, ‘call it that’: 34 lines of three one-syllable words that capture the deep relief of ‘fat rain / call it that’ after a long dry
  • Rachael Mead, ‘Catastrophic Fire Danger: level 6’, which is painfully topical just now – ‘I scan the blue for smoke. Plants, words, thoughts /all crackle to dust in this catastrophic light.’
  • Toby Fitch, ‘Cultivate a New Foot’: tantalisingly almost coherent, rich wordplay – ‘incredibly the gossiping planet / will still be there on the weekend / no madder how many selfies weaken the collective / labour / bargaining agreement’
  • Gareth Jenkins, ‘Dream sequence’: I probably noted this because Gareth Jenkins read beautifully at the recent Francis Webb reading. It’s 10 very short (one to three lines) poems that have the uncanniness of dream.
  • Brenda Saunders, ‘Figures in a landscape’: a First Nations voice speaks back to a colonial painting of Sydney Harbour – ‘I am not in this picture. Invisible, I fall / easily into shadow, watch the ladies walk / float white as sails on water.’
  • Jordie Albiston, ‘gasp’: previously unpublished, this feels as if it’s from a longer sequence – some great upheaval in the ocean and ‘our strange & / elusive beast of the deep flipped & flopped / in an agony of light & without / any sound drowned in a great flood of air’
  • Tyson Yunkaporta, ‘No Cure for Colour Blind’: I haven’t understood this poem yet, but there’s a lot in it about traditional knowledge (‘You can’t hear that story boy’) and Indigenous perspectives.
  • Elanna Herbert, ‘SIEV221 File Note: to mothers waiting’: A Christmas Island landscape, sneaks up on the subject of deaths at sea announced in its title – ‘If this was a different page / in the novel of Christmas Island / this would be the postcard beach.’
  • Zenobia Frost, ‘Taming the Shrew’: a sweet poem about a key moment in a young woman’s life that had the perhaps unintended consequence of making me want to see the movie 10 Things I Hate About You
  • Tricia Dearborn, ‘Therapist, dreamt’:a kind of love poem to a therapist, the kind that probably wouldn’t pose ethical issues for said therapist
  • Jeff Guess, ‘Transgression of the Trees’: a lament for ancient trees cut down for roadworks, which, though it was published a year ago, could be a poignant response to current violence against sacred trees in Victoria
  • Alison Flett, ‘Vessel’: An almost Proustian moment in which a child begins to understand something – ‘a first meme / which will repost versions of itself again / and again in her brain

As with previous AP anthologies there are no stars, but much excellence. There’s a huge variety of forms, and I hope I’ve given you a sense of the range of subjects.

Jacinda Woodhead (editor), Overland 233 (Summer 2018)

This issue of Overland kicks off with ‘26 January – or thereabouts‘ by the venerable Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen, a brief history of the Australia Day holiday that takes effective potshots in passing at any number commonly believed fallacies. Here are some fabulous factoids from the article:

  • It’s not just the left and First Nations peoples calling for a change of date. Conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey and Hugh Morgan, mining magnate, have each pitched for a different day.
  • In the early 20th century Irish Catholics (my lot) celebrated ‘Australia Day’ on the Feast of Our Lady Help of Christians (24 May). The Red Cross instituted ‘Australia Day’ on 30 June 1915 and 1916.
  • Though Victoria and South Australia pride themselves as having been established as ‘free colonies’, the South Australia Company actually ‘floated on chattel-slavery’ (a phrase McQueen, sadly, doesn’t unpack) and ex-convict John Pascoe Fawkner may have a greater claim to be founder the Victorian colony than land thief Batman.
  • ‘Invasion Day’, a term now reviled as a Marxist invention, is anything but: ‘Invasion’ was the word used by small-l liberal (Sir) Keith Hancock in 1930, and even more tellingly by the right-wing historian Sir Archibald Grenfell Price in White Settlers and Native People (1949). Marxist McQueen sinks the boot into soft-left Labor Party figures by pointing out that ‘the academic convention of using “invasion” did not stop Queensland ALP premier Wayne Goss from erasing the term from the school curriculum’.
  • Terra nullius is ‘a doctrine formed only in the late nineteenth century in relation to the status of the polar regions. That the High Court accepted terra nullius in Mabo confirms the venerable legal doctrine of Judicial Ignorance.’ I knew this from reading Heather Goodall’s Invasion to Embassy (my blog post is here), but the furphy that it was there from 1788 is so well established I’d forgotten the reality.

That’s not the whole article: McQueen comes up with some positive though hardly serious suggestions for alternative dates, but I’ll leave you to read them for yourself.

Of the regular columnists, Alison Croggon’s , ‘On the #MeToo movement‘, written before the Geoffrey Rush court case was concluded, is complex as ever. Tony Birch’s column, ‘On bullshit‘ is a fabulous rant against university bureaucracy. Giovanni Tiso ruminates on the wistful belief that we can learn things from tapes under the pillow while sleeping, in On learning French while you sleep.

Of the other articles, ‘The eleven best Australian essays of the past 3,533 days‘ by Dean Biron is a spectacularly self-indulgent piece that manages to convince me that the eleven essays he singles out are worth looking up; ‘Hand on heart‘ by Elfie Shiosaki draws a line connecting letters written to the WA ‘Protector of Aborigines’ by Aboriginal parents a century go and the 2018 twitter hashtag #IndigenousDads; ‘Power ballet by Kirsten Krauth speaks from within women’s wrestling fandom.

Jennifer Mills, Overland‘s fiction editor for many years, writes in defence of utopian/eutopian and dystopian fiction in ‘Against realism‘ and then serves up a quartet of short fictions of decidedly dystopian bent, of which ‘Noplace‘ by Claire G Coleman and ‘Idle hands‘ by Wayne Macauley grabbed and held me.

The poetry section (yes, the poetry is gathered in one place – all the easier for poetryphobes to ignore, you might say) is filled with riches. My favourite single poem is ‘Blessed be this sadness‘ by Omar Sakr, a meditation on suffering that has Les Murray’s ‘A Perfectly Ordinary Rainbow’, acknowledged, in the background. My favourite lines are from ‘Learning‘ by Allison Gallagher:

I am learning to live inside a broken thing
when I call this body a wreckage in the middle of the night
you ask me not to speak about your home that way

Overland always features the results of a literary competition. In this issue it’s the Fair Australia Prize, an annual competition supported and funded by the National Union of Workers, and is made up of five general prizes worth $3000 each and three prizes for union members worth $1000 each. All the prize winners are worth reading, especially Laura Elvery’s short story ‘Your cart is empty‘ which raises chilling prospects and then chills from another, unexpected direction, and Miriam Jones’s winning essay ‘Care and cooperativism in early childhood‘, which argues that early childhood workers are ideally placed to take on the project of finding alternatives to capitalist ways of organising work.

As I write this, I’ve been reading news of Jacinda Woodhead’s departure as editor. I guess I have a couple more of her issues left to read. I’ll miss her.

Michelle Hamadache (guest editor), Southerly Vol 78 No 1 2018: Festschrift David Brooks

David Brooks has retired as editor of Southerly after two decades in the chair. In this issue, Southerly‘s community of writers and scholars celebrates his contribution, his work and his person.

The only festschrift I’d read before this was one I copy-edited decades ago. It honoured a distinguished psychology professor on his retirement and consisted of a number of learned papers about his contributions to his field. David Brooks, and Southerly itself, being concerned with literature, this festschrift isn’t that straightforward. Some pieces are very personal, even intimate, replete with private jokes and tales of shared meals; others, especially the poems, have no easily discernible connection to Brooks. Only by the contents page could I tell whether some pieces were part of the festschrift or belonged in the ‘Unthemed’ category, and in the end I decided it didn’t matter. What counts is that Brooks and the Southerly community can see the connection – the overarching effect of this issue is to demonstrate the existence of that community as warm, sometimes passionate, and far-reaching.

There are poems, short stories, and articles discussing Brooks’s writing that range from a sober overview from Judith Beveridge to ecstatically personal, which is as it should be. There is frequent reference to his veganism and advocacy for ‘non-human animals’, including the rescue sheep who share his life in the Blue Mountains. Two letters address him personally – from fellow-vegan poet John Kinsella and Greek scholar Vrasidas Karalis. Brooks himself speaks in a poem, a short story and a long interview with Andrew Burke.

It’s a good read over all, and full of excellence. I just want to single out three surprises.

In ‘Letter to David Brooks from a Certain Greek Friend’, Vrasidas Karalis seizes the moment to expound about Australian literary life, reaching a kind of climax of idiosyncrasy in this paragraph:

As a privileged outsider, I felt that the sacrificial act that established the new covenant of Australian poetry was the suicide of Adam Lindsay Gordon, renewed periodically by Francis Webb’s madness and Michael Dransfield’s drug-induced death. There is always something odd and tormented in Australian poetry, despite Les Murray’s efforts to make everything cosy, tamed and over-poetical.

(page 89)

Linking Lindsay Gordon, Webb and Dransfield as Christ-figures is pretty wild, though interesting, but I’m in total awe of a world-view that sees truculent Les Murray as trying to make everything cosy.

The second surprise is a piece of serendipity. I read the Southerly after quoting those lines from Allison Gallagher in the Overland. I was brought up short, then, when I read, also in Vrasidas Karalis’ wide-ranging letter:

I never understood why many writers are so tormented by the idea of home: there is one home only – our body (or on some rare occasions someone else’s body)

(pag 91)

Third surprise is the short poem that ends the journal: ‘Ballad’, eight previously unpublished lines by Bruce Beaver, which begin:

I'm off to Hullaboola, where the climate's never cooler
than a ringside seat in Hell, they're growing corn there
That pops the while it's growing, and the reason why I'm going
Is because I hate the name and wasn't born there.

This is listed as part of the festschrift but as Beaver (I’ve blogged about his poetry here) died in 2004 he can’t have written it with this publication in mind. On the one occasion when I met David Brooks he expressed great admiration of Beaver, so I guess that’s why these lines are here. It’s also somehow fitting that they are bouncily metrical and have lots of conventional rhyme, completely untypical of Bruce Beaver or of David Brooks, so after quite a lot of seriousness it’s a lovely bit of cheek to end on.

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Overland 226

Posted on 30 August 2017 | 2 comments

Jacinda Woodhead (editor), Overland 226 (Autumn 2017)

226 cover.inddI’m an issue behind in my Overland reading, but I’m glad I resisted the temptation to skip this one.

Over the dinner table last night, someone complained that the left is obsessed with identity politics. Well, that may true of the left as understood in the mainstream media, but Overland is probably as close as we’ve got to an official organ of the left in Australia, and I can report that identity politics are a long way from dominating this issue. Article after article sheds light and brings precision to areas that are too often discussed in dim and befuddled terms.

‘All worlds die’ by Angus Reoch is the stand-out piece for me. Responding to what the article’s subtitle calls ‘the politics of despair’, he argues:

Chomsky was correct when he argued that climate change is an unprecedented crisis and that mankind’s potential for destruction is unmatched. Yet culturally, the twenty-first century does not have the luxury of claiming ‘the end of world’ as a unique historical moment. We have no other choice than to fight climate change, but we are not unique in human history to be living in an apocalyptic predicament. Many societies have seen ‘the end of history’. The First World War was only the final gut-wrenching body blow to the old world, upon the corpse of which the Second World War was fought, and the new world order erected. Many of the great writers before these events, from Leo Tolstoy to Natsume Sōseki, directly grappled with the realisation of a passing era, and the decline not only of aristocracy but of the old world itself. These writers were highly aware of the passing of their era and realised that in the modern age of European hegemony there was no choice but to adapt. […]

I recommend the whole article. Here’s the second last paragraph:

Perhaps we should not celebrate the demise of this world, for we do face the very real spectre of barbarism, but we should recognise the brutal and limiting nature of the world in which our societies have flourished. The fall of the neoliberal era is a necessary condition of a more peaceful and prosperous world.

There are at least four other articles that would have justified the price of the journal. And they’re all available on line for free).

In ‘It is still the Balanda way‘, Amy Thomas argues that while some Aboriginal languages such as Wiradjuri and Marra are being retrieved, this does not mean that Aboriginal languages are generally being respected and resourced. On the contrary, living languages are threatened with extinction by Northern Territory government educational policies and the continuing Intervention (aka Stronger Futures).

It is important not to overstate the way that language shapes our worldview. We create language, rather than the other way around. Yet what is lost when a language dies is more than just a linguistic curiosity; a community’s history and ways of viewing the world are lost with it. Losing your mother tongue through the forced imposition of a dominant language is disempowering, at least partly because it is an attempt to reshape your identity to suit someone other than yourself.

C J Chanco, a Filipino/a living in Toronto, addresses the phenomenon of Duterte in ‘Law and order’, in particular the question of how his murderous ‘drug war’ command such widespread support, not just from the churches and the far right, but also from the general population and until recently from the Communist Party of the Philippines.

‘The quest for primordial whiteness’ by Ramon Glazov exposes the weird theoretical underpinnings of contemporary white supremacist ‘thinking’, beginning with Arthur de Gobineau’s 1853 opus, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, which now reads as outright deranged. Sadly events since this Overland was published have increased this article’s relevance:

How should we respond to the spread of ‘race realist’ arguments? Moral condemnation is not enough; it does not faze alt-righters to be called ‘racist’. Their ideology already assumes that racism is true, so accusing them of it is like accusing a Trot of being unpatriotic. What is more likely to give the ‘redpilled’ pause is the suggestion that they are being naïve, that their newfound politics is just as gullible as the liberal ‘cuck programming’ they have allegedly shed, that race realism is not a suppressed Grand Theory of Everything but a useless red herring

‘To be a queer teacher’ by Elizabeth Sutherland lays out the enormous burden placed on the shoulders of LGBTQ+ teachers. I guess this could be called ‘identity politics’, but I read it as bringing much-needed specific experience to current debates (though the marriage equality debate was still on a distant horizon when the essay was written).

The regular columnists all shine: Giovanni Tiso laments the way social media mean we can never escape ‘the unbearable closeness of others’; Alison Croggon writes a personal tribute to the late great John Berger; Mel Campbell talks about wanting to be liked as a writer, particularly a female writer; Natalie Harkin offers a dense reflection on kinds of responsibility and accountability at play for Indigenous writers, and – citing Kerry Reed-Gilbert – she  challenges non-Indigenous readers to understand multiple ways of belonging; to act and engage in the political struggle with Indigenous Australians.

Then there’s the literary / creative content, a strong feature of Overland from its beginning.

Each issue these days showcases the work of a different guest artist. The striking cover and all the internal artwork of Nº 226, including title pages for each of the fiction pieces, are by comics artist, illustrator and bag designer Nicky Minus (link is to Minus’s website). It’s a pleasure to be introduced to this artist’s work.

Overland sequesters poetry and fiction in separate sections rather than having them punctuate the rest of the journal, and they usually incorporate the results of at least one competition. The ten-page poetry section in #226 features the winner and runners-up of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, with a judges’ report from Toby Fitch and Jill Jones that’s a bit of a lesson in how to read poetry; and there are some startlingly erotic poems by Omar Sakr. The 22 pages of fiction comprise five short stories, including the winner of the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, Katy Warner’s ‘The Trip‘, a which deals with family relations in a way that made me want to cower under the bedcovers, in a good way (the runners–up are online). The other story that stands out for me is Afopefoluwa Ojo’s ‘A consequence of things’, a tale of teenage pregnancy told in Nigerian English, with a twist where what looks like an awkward metaphor becomes a literal reality.

Then at the very end of the journal, as if it’s an afterthought, there’s ‘Through the eyes of a humanist’ by Subhash Jaireth, a discussion of the work of 2015 Nobel Literature Laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Someone in my book club recently proposed that we read one of her books. If I had read this article, I would have been an enthusiastic seconder. Jaireth says:

It can be hard to imagine a book or work of art helping to topple a dictator, stop a war or shield a person from a bullet. But I (perhaps naively) believe that the strong moral imperative driving Alexievich’s work, and the chorus of voices given space to bear witness to human-made tragedy, create what are, effectively, works against war, brutality and tyranny – if only we seize the moment to listen.

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Southerly 76/3

Posted on 28 July 2017 | 2 comments

Laetitia Nanquette and Ali Alizadeh (guest editors), Southerly Vol 76 No 3 2016: Persian Passages

southerlypersian

As soon as I finished reading this issue of  Southerly I bought a second copy as a gift for a young Iranian friend who has recently got his permanent residency in Australia. I’ve yet to hear how he fared with the complex language, but I hope the dialogue between Australian and Persian cultures in these pages gives him at least some of the joy it has given me.

The title of the first item (if you don’t count the editorial – I’m sorry, I have an aversion to editorials and haven’t read this one) could be a subtitle for the whole journal: ‘This Is Not a Conversation about Asylum Seekers’. Adele Dumont and Mehdi Habibi met when he attended a writing class she taught in a detention centre for people seeking asylum. True to its title, the article is a dialogue about his writing (and we get to read his ‘Odd Sock’ later in the journal). The rest of the journal likewise focuses, not on the Iran of the Ayatollahs, producer of refugees and Manus or Nauru detainees, stuff of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, but on the rich Persian literary culture and the long and various history of Persians in Australia (whether from Iran, Afghanistan or other places covered by that term)

Zarlasht Sarwari’s ‘Afghan Australian Identities’,  Sanaz Fotouhi’s ‘Writing the Present: Unpacking the Suitcase of the Past’ and Kim Lateef’s ‘Where Are You From?’ each tell stories of diaspora and exile without conforming to the well established forms of such stories. The reader gets to hear these stories fresh and personal.

For me, the heart of the journal is a sustained, complex conversation about the ghazal and the great fourteenth-century poet Hafiz, master of that form (also spelled Hafez and Häfez in this issue – Southerly doesn’t impose narrowly consistent spelling or punctuation).

Paul Smith has been a key translator of Hafiz’s ghazals for decades. In ‘A Life with Hafiz’ he gives some insight into the devotion he has brought to the work. He lays out the formal requirements of the ghazal: a series of couplets, in which the second line end with the same rhyme word throughout the poem; and the poet’s name appears in the final couplet. His article incorporates several of his translations. Given the way poets writing ghazals in English have departed in many ways from these requirements, in ways that are discussed approvingly later in this journal, I was grateful to have them spelled out  so clearly.

Setayesh Nooraninejad’s ‘Poetic Bridges – Spanning Literary Traditions, Politics and Cultures’, an interview with Zahra Taheri (Convenor of the Persian Studies Program at the ANU), again refers to Hafez (her spelling) as a great overarching genius of Persian culture.

What brought the conversation home for me was Darius Sepehri’s ‘Judith Wright’s The Shadow of Fire: Making the Ghazal Appropriate in Australia’. The Shadow of Fire is Judith Wright’s last book , and it consists of ghazals. Sepehri argues that Wright had been reading Häfez (sic) seriously for decades (her short poem ‘To Hafiz of Shiraz’ dates from 1960), and that his ecstatic songs were crucial to the direction taken by her poetry towards the end of her life. Though Wright’s ghazals don’t rhyme, and don’t deal in great metaphysical abstractions in the manner of Häfez, Sepehri makes a subtle, and to me beautifully compelling, argument that they are successful adaptations of the form to the Australian environment, both physical and cultural, in a way that is analogous to the way people in modern Iran will quote lines from Häfez in different contexts so that they take on new meanings.

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The article bristles with insights into Judith Wright’s and Häfez’s poetry and into the place of Häfez in Persian culture. It sent me off to Judith Wright’s 1996 Collected Poems to read her work from 1974 (which is when the Collected Poems I own was published). In the last decades of her life, as she focused on activism on Aboriginal issues and the environment, her poetry generally became grimly pessimistic, at times seeming to indicate that she had lost faith in the idea of poetry itself. Towards the end, she writes that she has indeed lost faith in rhyme, and now would focus on haiku, almost letting things speak for themselves. But there are no haiku in the Collected. Instead, at the end, there is this handful of exultant, wonderful ghazals. I can imagine no better introduction to them than Sepehri’s article.

There’s plenty more, not all of it on theme:

  •  a number of memorable short stories including Carmel Bird’s ‘The Dead Aviatrix and the Stratemeyer Syndicate’, a possibly autobiographical tale of confused identities, and Claudine Jacques’ ‘Life Sentence’ translated by Patricia Worth, about leprosy in New Caledonia.
  • excellent poems, including eight by contemporary Iranian poet Yadollah Royaee, translated by the journal’s editors
  • reviews – by Evelyn Araluen Corr of Liz Conor’s Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women and Simeon Kronenberg of Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses. 

This Southerly is nominally the third issue for 2016. It would be churlish to complain that it arrived six months late – literary journals aren’t buses, after all, and they take readers to destinations that transcend schedules.

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