After a quick lunch at the pub a block away from the Carriageworks, we were back for three more sessions.
4 pm: Bringing the Past to Life
This was three novelists talking about historical fiction. Robbie Arnott (author of Limberlost and Dusk, links to my blog posts), Yann Martel (Life of Pi, which I read and loved long before blogging, and most recently Son of Nobody), and Tasma Walton (actor most notably in the Mystery Road television and film franchise, author of I am Nannertgarrook). They were wrangled by the incomparable Kate Evans.
Tasma Walton started from a family story, a great love story: one of her ancestors, an Aboriginal woman, met a white man and eloped with him to live on an idyllic island. She knew early on that something was not right about that version, and when she explored it she found the now familiar story of sealers raiding First Nations communities in what is now Victoria and kidnapping women to live a life of slavery. The book is part of the larger project of reclaiming language, and she told us that her training as an actor was important in creating these historical characters: she would give them a back story, imagine herself into the skin of the character, like an actor preparing for performance, then write.
Robbie Arnott was charming and funny. After saying, ‘I don’t like to be perceived,’ he cooperated and talked interestingly about himself and his books. No one had noticed, he said, that the sealers from Tasma’s book turn up in Dusk. ‘Oh, I noticed,’ Kate Evans said, ‘but we’ll get to that.’ Robbie said that Dusk had its origins in fishing trips with his father to the Tasmanian/lutruwita highlands. He was enchanted by that landscape and in particular by a moment when a herd of deer appeared out of the bush. He tries to capture the feel of that land in the book. Questioned about his invention of giant bones poking up out of the earth, he said they were his way of communicating how ancient the land felt. Jokingly (I think), he said that Dusk, the giant puma who gives the book its title, was inspired not by legends about big cats in the Australian bush but by cane toads – the prime example of disastrously introduced species.
Yann Martel really wanted to talk about his earlier book, Beatrice and Virgil, which is more accurately described as a historical fiction than Son of Nobody. But he did what Kate Evans asked of him and discussed the latter book – it’s a story of the Trojan War with footnotes. There’s a black line across the middle of each page – the Troy story unfolds above the line and the story of the footnote creator below it. Though he didn’t read the actual Iliad until he was an adult he was fascinated by the story as a child (Robbie Arnott interjected that he had read it as a child – ‘I didn’t have any friends.’) Because Troy is myth as much as history, he had freedom to invent, to jin the many authors these days who, for instance, retrieve the women’s stories. His Holocaust book features two taxidermied animals, a donkey and a monkey. He didn’t elaborate on how that relates to the history, beyond saying that it was his way of taking a fresh look at the familiar horrors.
There was an interesting discussion of violence. All three books include a lot of it. Tasma Walton said that every act of violence in her book comes from the colonial records, so it was difficult to write in the first person. Again her training as an actor came into play, especially the instruction, ‘Open your heart.’ Which is a good instruction for readers as well.
I came away from the session with Book Club possibilities in mind.
Two hours later, we came back for:
7 pm: Writing in the Age of Trump
This was a panel. Sisonke Msimang did a terrific job as host/facilitator. After introducing her three US writer guests – Tayari Jones, S.A. Cosby and Deborah Baker, all from the south of the USA – she said something like, ‘The title of the session means we have to talk about Donald Trump, but first tell us what your southern heritage means to you.’ And we didn’t get to Trump for at least 40 minutes.
S.A Cosby writes crime novels, but that was not what he was there for and I came away knowing very little about his books. He, like Tayari Jones (see previous blog post), writes against the assumption that the South is all about the oppression of Blacks. He and she spoke eloquently about Black culture, and Black community. She identified herself as a suburban Southerner.
Deborah Baker, the only non-Black person on stage, is the author of Charlottesville: An American Story, which gives the background of the ‘Unite the Right’ demonstration in 2017. She did a lovely job of explaining that there was debate in that city over three Confederate monuments – a lot of emotion, but generally attempts to hear each other – some African Americans, for instance, were in favour of keeping the memorials because without them important history is in danger of being forgotten. But white supremacists, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, decided to make it their issue, and things turned lethal.
In the lifetimes of the panellists – and none of them is as old as me – public schools in the south called the Civil War the ‘War of Northern Aggression’. It wasn’t about slavery but about state rights, they were told. I think it was Sean Cosby who said his response to that is, ‘States’ rights to do what?’
Some tidbits:
- In 1956 Ezra Pound, incarcerated in a mental hospital in Washington DC because of his support for the Nazis, sent one of his disciples to start a race war in Charlottesville. History has echoes.
- When Tayari Jones was at school, her parents wouldn’t give permission for her to ‘participate in white supremacist activities’ including an excursion to see the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world at Stone Mountain Park.
- Sean Cosby’s face was mostly obscured by a baseball cap, which I think was to protect his eyes – because when he read to us, he seemed to have so much trouble making out the words that it was hard for us to follow the thread. But when at last the conversation turned to Donald Trump, he delivered a wonderful, passionately articulate rant that made one’s heart sing.
Again, with moments to spare, the Emerging Artist and I headed to our next sessions. She went to ‘Brave Conversations‘, which left her less than enthused, while I went to:
8 pm: Rhythm of Truth poetry gala
As the title suggests, this was a line-up of poets, the only poetry event I managed to attend in the whole festival. It was terrific.
Sara M. Saleh was in the chair. Sadly , she didn’t read any of her own poetry, though Maxine Beneba stepped into the breach and read one of Sara’s poems in her set. Riffing on the festival’s theme, ‘Show me the truth’, Sara said in her general introduction: ‘It’s a poet’s job to tell the truth, the kind that slips in before your mind catches up.’
Mariel Roberts Musa had two solo spots where she played the cello with electronic effects. They were intense and mesmerising intervals, but the poets were the main event (I’ve found links to some of the poems in case you want to chase them up):
- Evelyn Araluen (I’ve blogged about Dropbear and The Rot) read three poems from The Rot, which she said were originally intended to be three parts of one long poem: ‘Sleep Act One’, ‘Sleep Act Two’ and ‘You’.
- Michael Pedersen, among other things, Edinburgh’s Makar/Poet Laureate, stepped onto the stage with a stand-up’s flair and a thick Scottish accent, and performed ‘The cat prince‘ (featuring a weird little boy and a wonderful mother) and what he elsewhere calls a super-short friendship love poem, ‘Boys holding hands‘.
- Nikita Gill, of Irish and Indian heritage, is apparently big on instagram. She read to us from a work in progress called ‘Men say things to me and then I have an existential crisis’. I especially loved the one where a man tells her to go back to the kitchen imagining it to be a confining space, but which she reimagines as the place where women connect and make things happen, including perhaps a revolution.
- After reading a poem by Sara M. Saleh, Maxine Beneba Clarke read from her own book Beautiful Changeling. ‘I want to grow old’ speaks back eloquently to the idea that ageing is a bad thing, from the perspective of someone not yet 50. Good poem, I thought, but what do these whippersnappers know about growing old?
- David Stavanger asked landlords in the audience to raise their hands and then sneered when no one did, ‘Landlords never raise their hands.’ His main theme seems to be mental illness. I liked ‘I’ve been thinking about your birth lately‘.
- Omar Musa finished up the evening with a number of poems accompanied by ‘my beautiful wife’ Mariel Roberts Musa. He performed a version of ‘Queanbeyan‘. Then they totally destroyed the room with ‘The burning‘, which you can get some idea of from the video at the link: ‘you and me / we have become numb / numb even to burning’.
And that was the end of our first day.
Me fail? I fly! 