Kiran Bhat's Blog

Hello everyone! It's been ages since I posted here. Truthfully I had forgotten a little bit about this space. I don't know why... Goodreads helps unites readers across the globe.

I thought I'd talk about a project that I am publishing that I think people here might be interested in. It's called Girar.

Girar ('to turn' in Spanish) aspires to capture the flow and feel of daily life across 365 different places on our planet. The stories involve an archetypal Mother and Father, living a content and settled life all the while trying to make sense of Son, proudly gay, living far from them in a foreign country. Each instalment reimagines the essences of Mother or Father or Son into a new cultural context and nationality. By reading all of the instalments at once, Girar not only gives the reader a unique and intimate portrait of all of our Earth’s imagined countries; it tells the tale of a family coming to love each other despite their disagreements, over the slow burn of a decade.


Girar publishes through a website called www.girar.world. Subscribers pay a nominal fee of 1.5 USD a month or 10USD a year to gain access to the stories. People who subscribe are then sent emails when each installation comes out. An installation is time-stamped, to come out on a certain day of the 2020s in a certain location of Planet Earth. For example, if a story is told on March 23rd in Mariupol at 10:32 Ukrainian time, imagining Mother making porridge as she awaits a phone call from Father to know when it is safe to evacuate her house, readers get emailed that story at that exact time and date no matter where they are on the planet, as if they are directly receiving a piece of life unfolding in that part of the world at that very moment to Mother or Father or Son. The pieces are fiction, but are written and published in real time as if they are in fact happening. The goal is to capture real life as it is happening to us in the 2020s from each culture of the planet. Whether it is by capturing major international conflicts as they are happening to us or giving narratives to cultures that people on a global scale rarely think about, I aspire to make Girar something of a live journal of this decade in the very direct way we are experiencing it, so that people centuries later can have a recording of everything that occurred in the 2020s in all the corners of Planet Earth.

If you are interested in checking out this project, please do head over to www.girar.world. I will try to start sharing more and more about this project and what it means to write it, as well as samples of the writing.

I look forward to sharing to you all my version of Planet Earht.

Kiran

It's a new year, and I've been a lot less Goodreads active. Too busy with other projects, we can say... nevertheless, I've been wondering; what's been going on for all of you, who happen to have added me on this page? Are you busy writing? Are you surviving COVID? How's life?

My best wishes,

Kiran

Book Review: The Boat, by Nam Le

The Boat is written as a certain promise trying to be fulfilled by the author: that I, Nam Le, no matter how much people want to associate me with my Vietnamese heritage, refuse to be defined. I have the right to be any person I want to be, and so I’m going to from any time period, perspective, and nationality I thus choose. Literally, the first story takes place in the mind of an MFA student who so chooses to write his stories wherever he pleases, in order to ignore the pressures that his immigrant father puts on him to settle, as well as the pressures of the students around him to write from the space of his ethnicity. The bet that the un-named protagonist takes in the first story becomes the framing device which gives the rest of the story collection their structure. It is with this motif that Nam Le sets stories from lands as diverse as Hiroshima, Japan to Tehran, Iran. Make no mistake that Nam Le’s debut collection of stories is over a decade old, and one cannot dare deny the splash that the book had when it was published. At the same time, audacity is not the only thing which can make a collection of stories work. Nam Le has fulfilled his promise to the reader, but the story he has delivered seem bereft of much humanity.

The Boat certainly does not benefit much from the range of places Le has chosen to write from. It often feels that Le decided he wanted to write a set of stories set all over the world, but being unable to travel, or really spend time in each of the said given places, he chose the most ‘representative’ place of the country he could think of, summoned the most obvious stereotypes one can encounter of such a place, and rather than write against his assumptions, wrote towards them. Drug dealing in Colombia, the Atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima… these are all stories long hashed out by the media, long expired of any novelty or interest. And yet these are the situations in which Le chooses to write from. To be fair, he does try to give a more human concern to each of the stories, but the stories and stereotype associated with the backgrounds he has chosen already so strong, that to even consider setting a story in such a landscape already works against his favour. The stories often feel like they are plodding in mud rather than having something to say.

One cannot merely use Google Maps or research to create characters. One has to put oneself in that land, and in that perspective, and really emote as how people of that place of origin would. When one lacks this desire to connect, the stories will read hollow, no matter how ambitious or well put-together they superficially appear. And, so, if one dare decides to write from the perspectives of all the nationalities of the world, one must not do so not because they can. They must do so because they really want to do something on their behalf.

That being said, The Boat certainly showcases them. His capacities with structure and timing are on-point, and his ratio of dialogue to narrative are well done. His stories do have the feeling of workshop writing, in that they seem almost too perfected on the craft level, but not completely thought out at the implementation stage. So, there is a lot to admire, there is the sense that something of much greater insight and humanity – perhaps even globetrotting – will come from the same pen.

It is just meant to be in another piece of writing.

[A version of this was published in the Mascara Literary Review earlier this month]

While it was a mainstay of early 20th century writing, the styles, tendencies, and structures of social realist literature went out of vogue fairly quickly. Perhaps it is because of the proselytising nature of such texts, or because works of only one particular vision or message tend to lose freshness on multiple reads. Nonetheless, we live in a time where plenty has gone awry, and the world needs stronger voices yet. From the pages of Towards the End, it is clear that Ali Alizadeh aspires to be one such voice. He is eager to observe the hypocrisies and toxicities of an Australia connected to the global economy, and he aspires to use poetry as a space to right his country’s wrongs.

Alizadeh is a master of the cynical and the bare. He often likes to string words together into the most uncomplex sentences, to make sure that the theme or topic of his words hit with the greatest impact. The poem ‘Refugee’ begins with the warning, ‘If you come to this country without a visa you won’t be settled in this country,’ just as the poem ‘P.S.’ begins with a proclamation: ‘We are decent. We love our country and our liberty.’ Though Alizadeh is writing so directly, his words do not speak with an intimacy. Rather, there’s a deep frustration embedded at how things are in Australia. There’s a sense that no matter how much people of colour give themselves to Australia, the last thing they will be given is acceptance, or a place in society, and Alizadeh uses his poetry to call it it what it is: messed up.

What makes these poems more than exercises in didacticism is how Alizadeh’s poems move from the stark to the unexpected. Returning to the poem, ‘P.S.,’ one assumes that the poem is meant to be a stripping down of everything that makes Australia an inherently difficult country for its outsiders. What it becomes in the middle is an ode to the impossibilities of capitalism, instead.

‘We dream

of feeling happiness as psyches rejoice

at buying iJunk and designer socks, a life

finally expiating its futility

if lucky, with a (record low) pay rise.’

The tone of the poem remains colloquial, but the jumble of words like ‘expiating’ with ‘futility’ create a unique sound, while images of ‘iJunk’ next to ‘designer socks’ render a clear vision of an archetype – Melbournian, hipster, most likely addicted to anything Apple throws their way – Alizadeh is trying to criticise. But, Alizadeh is not trying to stereotype, nor is he trying to cast judgment. He’s just tired of the way things are, and he wants it to change, hence why he concludes his poem on a summoning of the ‘immeasurable power’ of human will to ‘rupture the reality of the world and instigate new worlds.’

Alizadeh is also a master of wordplay. Most of his poems demonstrate a unique use of vocabulary to allow the sounds of the English language to reach greater heights. Take his poem, ‘Destinal,’ in which one casually intrudes upon sentences like ‘ink stains on the paper occlude the noumenon.’ The long /o/ of ‘occlude’ along with the length of syllables in ‘noumonen’ create an extremely satisfying mouth muddle that is hard to imagine succeeding if penned by another writer. In the poem ‘Post-Marx,’ Alizadeh remarks,

‘Landlords don’t lord

it over overindulged

go-betweens

poised between domination and damnation

by market’s melodramatics.’

Each line is built on an alliteration, and a subversion of words that appear similar in length and consonant (‘landlord’ and ‘lord,’ ‘domination’ and ‘damnation, ‘market’ and melodramatic’). The meaning of the words clash, however. As a result, the pairing of these words create harmony and cacophony, nonsense and consequence, all at once.

In my opinion, the strongest poem in the collection is ‘Australian Day.’ The poem showcases all of Alizadeh’s strengths in one piece of writing, and does so with cohesion. For example, the beginning few lines have all of the trademark punch and power of Alizadeh’s starts.

‘Barbeque and cricket

and now you’re a citizen. I’d slap

my own ungrateful

subject’s face.’

Yet, lines like ‘I’d kick my heart for its failure to attract another’ inspire a rare empathy and pathos. There’s a sense that as Alizadeh reflects on his inabilities to measure up to the Australian standard, he is more willing to be vulnerable. He even ends his poem on a very real desire that most second generation people feel when they are born and raised in a country that does not understand them.

‘It’s called

hope

for an encounter, a place

in the universe

of the loved.’

Liminal and exciting, deceptively simple on a language level, yet eagerly complex on a conceptual one, Towards the End is a unique space where memory, sentence, and language align. Alizadeh’s lines live in the blasé, and yet yearn for what appears to be futile. Alizadeh wants to see an end towards the oppressions that occur from the awkward alignments of capitalism, racism, and societal socialisation. Towards that end, he has fused all the distrustfulness of his voice with all of the registers of postmodern style and structure, to invent a style of social realism that belongs not only to the early 21st century, but very much to Ali Alizadeh himself.

September 11th, 2020:

 

[This is an excerpt from a work in progress. More details can be found at this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/35488916]

The Queen of Sheba was the jewel of the land. When she came back from her visit to King Solomon, she was welcomed not by the dusts of the deserts – which had greeted her in the lands of Israel – but by the vast wealth of her countries. Enkus filled her cabinets, along with the return wishes from her advisors; enkus to her heart. Jewels; it was a day of jewels, and as a result, the year was welcomed to this earth in the same way as the Queen of Sheba was when she returned home, through prayer, dance, and celebration. Enkutatash. In Mother and Father’s house, it was past the hour of five, and yet the smells of the slaughtered goats and chicken from the morning earlier lingered. They mixed with the scent of the long grass spread on the floor. In some parts of the room, the smell was fresh, almost alpine, and then in other parts, the scent of meat was so strong that one felt as if one were in a butchery.

Otherwise, the house looked as it did on any other day. The walls were covered with family portraits, next to a framed photograph of Haile Selassie, which Father had brought from his village, a welcome gift from his own father. The television was on. World news and local news dominated the television, with an occasional reel about New Year’s celebrations repeated once in a while. Father was not in the house, but Mother was not alone. She happened to be in the company of her friends from church. All four of them were sitting on the floor, spread as far from each other as the blades of grass were. between themselves as the grasses were. Mother and a friend of her were cleaving the meat for dinner, while two other friends were drinking their coffee and watching the television. The last few minutes had been largely bereft of conversation, until one of the housewives – the only one who happened to live in Gerji, Mother’s neighbourhood – burped. It was surprisingly loud given her posture. She was a short lady who looked like she was crunched into herself because she wanted to hold her bodily functions in, whereas the sound in question resonated the way that burps given by the unabashed and unselfconscious do. Goatherds in a village could be freely heard burping in such a way; not necessarily an urban, educated person.

Something about the burp forced a sigh out of Mother, and she slapped her cleaver to the goat meat that much harder. Mother had a friend who couldn’t help but respond to things which need not response. That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers looked at the two other women on the floor and said to Mother, in the tradition of whispering, “It always gets harder to control these things as you get older.”

She was probably making an insinuation related not to the woman who had released gas, but to the oldest woman in the group, nearing eighty. This was the first woman Mother had met during her first day at church in Gerji, and the one who Mother interacted with the most out of this group before time and circumstance had made them into a collective. Mother trusted so much in whatever this woman said that she often called her Her Greatest Advisor. Her Greatest Advisor looked at That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers , and then she looked at Mother, and then she said, “It isn’t as hard as you think. I think certain ladies know how to behave, and that doesn’t change with age.”

“It is okay,” That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers said. “It is scientific. Body muscles get weaker. Look at my thighs. I can’t stretch them without a bit of pain.”

“That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers, you are barely sixty,” Mother said.

“I know. I can’t imagine what it is like at your age,” That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers said, looking over at their eldest church friend.

“I was the one yesterday who helped you find the goats. I carried two of them under my arms.” Here she flexed, making it very clear that she still had biceps.

“I’m not saying you are weak,” That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers said. “I am saying certain muscles get weaker.”

“That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers, this isn’t important,” Mother said. “Change the channel. I’m tired of watching the news. This is Enkutatash. We should be listening to music, and song—”

At the exact same time, another bodily sound came. This time it was a much clearer burp, and it was very obviously from the short one. She did not hide it in the least this time. Her mouth was wide open, and it came belching out. All of the women looked at her with dazed eyes, as if she had shouted a curse. She did not respond. She decided to lay on her back and unstiffen her intestines, letting small packs of gas sound out from her stomach. “Something in the doro wat was not very good,” she said. “I might need to see a doctor.”

“You need to see more than a doctor if you make sounds like that,” Mother said. “May God help you.” The women laughed, even the one who had burped, but Mother kept her face taut and solemn. She had finished cutting up the meat. She took the pile of goat flesh on the silver tray into the kitchen.

“Do you need help of any sort?” the oldest of the group asked.

“No, no, rest,” That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers said, patting the air, keeping her voice calm.

The oldest of the group said, “I’m not a dying calf.”

“She is not,” Mother said, returning from the kitchen. “She is My Greatest Advisor.” Mother and Her Greatest Advisor grinned at each other. Mother came to Her Greatest Advisor’s side, and said, “Do you remember when Gerji was just a village?”

“It still is,” Her Greatest Advisor chuckled. Gerji was an industrial area important for its exportations of aluminum and coffee, but otherwise a collection of construction yards and barely finished houses, indistinguishable from any other developing suburb. “It is because we are close to the airport that we think it is anything but.,” “I can’t believe how many tall buildings there are now. Soon, the goat sellers on the other side of here will be selling watches.”

“Or they will be selling electronic candles, and not the pink wax ones.” This was said by the her who belched a lot.

Mother put on a smile and said, “You have lived here the longest, you would know.”

“Oh, I barely live here. Ever since my son moved to Canada, I spend half of the year there, half of the year here. You must know. You also have a son living abroad. Where is he living? What is he doing? I forgot.”

“You’re always forgetting,” Mother added. “She is just a Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot.”

This was the nickname that Mother always gave this woman behind her back, usually when she was talking to Father, and no one else. The other women had heard it here or there, usually when Mother had lost her temper, but never responded to it. Nevertheless, Her Greatest Advisor said, “I know. It is like she is the eighty-something one here.”

This time, Mother laughed the loudest. The problem with the laugh was that no response could be said after it. The women were silent once more, sitting about, saying nothing to each other. Despite that, there was plenty of noise. Gerji was every bit of Addis Ababa as it wasn’t; outside, on the dusty road, were vendors, selling greens, selling corn to be roasted for the New Year, mindlessly shouting out the names of their products. Often, men outside would start getting into shouting fights. No outsider would know what they were angry about, but the neighbourhood would hear it, until something or other were to get resolved. On this day in particular, little girls strolled around the neighborhood, singing “Abebayehosh.” They beat their drums, clapped their hands, and sang ‘lemlems,’ all the while carrying bright yellow adey abebas in their hands, to be exchanged for bread, calves, or hard-earned cash. The singing of the girls could be heard in the distance, not particularly close.

Close enough, though, to cause That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers to hum to herself. It wasn’t very loud, but anyone familiar with the song would hear the horns blaring, in rhythmic refrain. Almost as if it were instinct, as That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers went through the verse a second time, the women began to clap along. At the point where the chorus started, Her Greatest Advisor warbled, “Ahun aye ayine.” Her voice was harsh on the ears, but she sang with such passion that one did not focus on the cracking of her voice, only on the intent she gave to the lyrics. “Meshito ayine be’liljinete…” Mother stood up to mute the news. “Merikagn sitimot enatee…” Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot let out a convenient fart. It was barely heard through the music the other two were making between them, but in a bid to obscure the sound, Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot stood and shouted out “Lamba dina!” Now she was stuck being the one who had to shout it, after every verse.

“Anchi lay weside talechign.”

“Lamba dina!”

“Kurazae lik ende’maye. Anchi nesh lambadinaye.”

“Lamba dina!”

Mother stood up, inhaled, and absolved Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot of her duties. She belted, “Lamba dina, lamba dina. Lamba dina honshilet. Le’ayine, le’ayine mebrat…”

Whenever Mother sang, it was hard not to stand up and take notice. She had one of the best voices in Gerji, and everyone from Meserete Kristos Church knew it. It was why she was the one in the choir who spent the most time practicing with the debtara, or why if anyone in Gerji had a birthday party or ceremony of importance, she would be invited to sing. Her voice was smooth, and yet deep. She wasn’t classically trained, but she knew how to hit the notes of whatever she sang in just the right way. She did not need to put any work into it; it just came out of her. She finished her portion of the song. The other women had their hands clasped together, as if they wanted to clap, but they didn’t know how. The light in their eyes were beaming, dazzling, as if they had been graced by the voice of one exalted.

Mother smirked at every one of them and sat down. This time, she led the chorus.

“Ayinoche ayayu, birhan yelachew. Belijinete, diro atitchachew. Liben tesemaw, engida neger, mirkuz yije new, yemiyawkegn hager. Alem tayechign be’anchi wist hona. Befikir kuraz be’ lamba dina.”

That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers and Her Greatest Advisor took over for “Ahun aye ayine, ahun aye ayine.”

Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot returned to her refrain of “Lamba dina, lamba.”

For the next stanzas, Mother pushed her voice harder. She sang, “Meshito ayine be’liljnete” as if she were an alto, and whispered out the words “Anchi lay weside talechign.” She was about to take her part up again as Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot repeated her “Lamba dina,” but as she did so, what came out of Mother’s throat was not the note that she expected. It was a crack. It wasn’t the loudest crack, but for someone who sang as well as Mother, it was clear she had not only missed her note, but messed up that part of the song. The women appeared to not have noticed it, and waited for Mother to sing along, but Mother resang the part of the song in which she’d cracked, and failed to hit the note again. She tried to sing on, but her notes were completely off.

“Go get her some water,” Her Greatest Advisor said to That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers, and That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers rushed to find some.

“Not cold water,” Mother said as she heard the fridge open. “It is worse on the voice.”

As if she had said nothing, Her Greatest Advisor and Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot continued singing where Mother had left off. Neither were good singers in the least. Mother tried to join them, but her voice and theirs combining created an utter cacophony, and as they realised it, they suddenly stopped. That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers came back with the water and Mother drank it. “My voice isn’t what it used to be,” she said.

That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers said, “Your voice is still beautiful.”

“I missed so many notes.”

“We’re singing just for fun.”

“My voice used to carry all of the notes.”

Mrs. Forgets-A-Lot said, “It is tough. Getting older.”

Something about the way she said it made all of the women look down. That Cloying and Cloisterous Friend of Hers winced at her thighs, well-clothed but visibly swollen. Her Greatest Advisor pressed her arms together, feeling her own biceps, wrinkled and grooved. Mother was staring in the direction of the television, but were eyes were empty, almost hollow. Mrs. Forgets-It-All took a glance at every one of them, pursed her lips, and sat back down. They made attempts at conversation, though none lasted long It was one thing when silence came because there was comfort, and nothing left to be said around close friends. When it came because there was too much to be said, but no one wanted to share their hurt, it was intolerable. Their attempts at conversation failed, and resulted in the housewives thinking up excuses, one by one, to return to their homes. “My house is a mess. I should clean it.” “My husband will be coming back from work anytime soon.” “My favourite serial is coming on in an hour.” Mother went to the door and said her goodbyes to each of them, heartily, superficially. She stared out into the potholed street. On the other side was a vendor sitting out with grass for sale who turned to stare back at her. She clutched her shawl tighter over her face frame and looked back in the direction of her friends. Just like the girls in the distance who were still singing the Abebayehosh song, her friends were walking in line, in white garb, hooting and hollering. And, as if she were still one of these girls, or because she had been one of these girls all along, Mother sang quietly to herself, “Lamba dina, lamba dina,” and closed the door.

The mid 20th century was a time of much promising Australian writing. While a lot of people from other countries can’t probably think of a single novelist of Australian origin penning great books, Patrick White dazzled the capacities of literature with his still and smouldering style, and Christina Stead brought a much-needed playfulness and liveliness to the female- voiced modernist novel. A novelist that has lost a lot of attention both in Australia and abroad would be Ruth Park. I find this a great shame. I don’t think of Park as a writer of the first order, but just like the early 20th century female Australian writer Henry Handel Richardson, Park brought a lot of sophistication and polish to the novel form. She also wrote about people who were at that time not often depicted in literature: migrants living in big cities.

 

The Harp in the South is a collection of three of Park’s most important novels, detailing the lives of Hughie and Margaret Darcy, a second generation Irish pair living in the slums of Sydney (Yes, at that time, like every other developing city, Sydney had slums, and loads of them).  Park wastes no time in depicting the destitution of the environment. The tenements of Sydney easily recall the early 20th century depictions of New York, and the reader is very easily set in the story as Park writes on. Park’s style is also very fluid and accessible. Her word usage is usually simple, with her storytelling doing most of the narrative’s legwork.

That being said, no matter how understated Park’s language is, it is very easy to recognize her talents. Park has one of the greatest ears for dialogue I have read. Her Irish Australians really sound properly hyphenated between both cultures, and no matter who she writes about, you can really hear how they properly sound. Park has the tendency to use apostrophes and dashes to indicate speech patterns. This is a style which often annoys me, but Park does it in a way that doesn’t seem to burden the text. Park chooses to use dialogue sparsely, and when she writes it, she does it very well, making sure that her characters jump off the page. The characters she writes about are also very easy to identify with. The trials and tribulations of the Darcy family are of the sort, that any immigrant, of any time period, would have to go through.

 

At a time when naturalism and its tendencies had long lost prominence, Park stood up, and wrote about things that novelists of the Australian landscape had yet to write about. Urban-rural conflict, cultural confusion, the poverty of tenement life; such themes would become a common focus of a lot of late 20th and early 21st century writing, as more places became urban, and these differences became a common tendency throughout the world. In being such a decadent stylist, Park incidentally preceded a lot of the stylistic tendencies of a later time period. She is no innovator, she is no world-defining novelist, but she wrote quiet stories about people who mattered, and she put them at the forefront of a culture using a pen. She has her prominence in the Australian canon for a reason. Whether she deserves global critical attention might be another question, altogether.

Book Review: The Hate Race, Maxine Benaba Clarke:

 

There is a question that those who are born out of multiple heritages and nationalities often rue. It is a question often uttered from a place of genuine curiousity, as well as a desire to understand a person based on their appearance, which, in the mindset of the person asking the question, is different-looking from them. If it is asked in a backpackers hostel in Vietnam, with nationalities ranging from Argentinian to Armenian, the question tends to hold less weight. If it is conversely asked in an extremely homogenous nation with little exposure to people of different racial origins, such as Turkmenistan, one often supposes it can be answered with nothing negative to its intent. However, what does the question, ‘where are you from?’ mean in a country as multi-racial and multi-origin as Australia? And, what does it mean, to be constantly asked that question, from the day that you are born, in the land that is meant to be your own?

 

The Hate Race is a memoir by Maxine Benaba Clarke that probes this very question in a very aching way. Clarke  Clarke was born in a suburb of Sydney in 1979 to immigrant parents (British by nationality, but Jamaican and Guyanese by blood). In 1980s Australia, Clarke was constantly reminded that her mixture, her parent’s story, her existence as a result of it, was not of the norm, and was a place from which she was meant to be ostracised and otherised. One of the most telling examples of this dehumanisation came from being called Student of the Week in her Grade One Class. As student of the week, Maxine, like any other student, is expected to stand up in front of the class, tell the students a little bit about herself, and then get back to work. During Maxine’s presentation, she says the things that any other school kid of her age would say. ( such as ‘ her favourite colour [is] yellow, or she ‘started a dance class last week, but [she didn’t] like it very much.’) Her teacher, Mrs Kingsley, immediately cuts her off. SHe gets to the point. She asks Maxine,‘“Where are you from?”’

 

Clarke tries to answer the question, first by answering that she comes from her mother’s stomach, and then her vagina. Furious by her referencing of female anatomy, Mrs Kingsley demands Clarke to open up on the country from which Maxine Benaba Clarke’s parents come from. She tells them England. This immediately gets a rebuke from another boy, who swears that ‘[his] nanna is from England and [Clarke’s] parents aren’t like her.’ This comment, along with Mrs Kingsley’s incessant demand for Clarke to question her own parents about their origins, emboldens other students to think outloud, and one of them asks, ‘“What do… people like you… feel like?”’ At the end of the ordeal, the students are asked to write their impressions of the classmate who was student of the week onto a cardboard poster. Though Clarke’s friend in class takes the time to write humanising comments, the majority of the comments on the card are the following:

 

“Maxine is brown.

Maxine has brown skin.

Maxine has funny curly hair.

Maxine thinks her family is from England.

Maxine has dark brown skin.

Maxine is nice and Maxine is black.

Maxine is friendly.

Maxine is not Australian.

Maxine is brown and does dancing.

Maxine has a black family and a little brother.

Maxine doesn’t know about her feelings.

Maxine is brown.

She is brown.

She has brown skin.”

 

Structurally, the way to which Clarke has written down the lines of the people who wrote of her is a scaffolding of its own. Most of the comments appear very conscious of the fact that Maxine is first-and-foremost of a different skin color, and even when a lot of the comments are race-neutral, it is often paired with a comment related to her race (‘Maxine is brown and does dancing,’ for example). There is also a sense of the language that a certain form of innocence is very being lost, and that Clarke is being asked to very much go on trial, for something that is neither a sin nor a crime. Clarke is meant to feel that she has to see herself as different first, and like everyone else second. In this usage of, ‘where are you from?’ the goal of the question is not to make someone feel like they are special for being unique, or that there is another history that makes them who they are. It is meant to make it clear that due to a set of categories that you did not choose to be born into, you are not like everyone else, and you have to remain in that box that society has assigned you, to act as if you are only valuable to a community if you are in that box, and to never feel free to question who you could be, if such a box were removed, and you were allowed to be evaluated on your own terms.

 

From the day of early childhood to the teenage years, Clarke consistently takes moments of her life, interrogates them, and gives them a certain form of literary justice. I wouldn’t say a poetic justice, because Clarke isn’t trying to write poetically. She is giving a record of what it means to be born as a foreigner in your own country, and the existential challenges which come throughout. Clarke is constantly made to represent random African countries she has nothing to do with (this is made particularly apparent when she makes up an African dance and performs it in front of her school as a teenager, and is applauded for being ‘authentic’), she is also constantly referred to as ugly, at the best of it, and with racial epithets, at the worst of it. Certain aspects of the book are cloying. Clarke often feels this need to begin or end her chapters constantly with some reference to the journey of her ancestors, often at times where it has nothing to do with her actual narrative. It is also when she tries to write poetically, often out of nowhere, that her writing fails. Clarke is at her best when she is keeping it real and saying things as they passed.

 

In twenty four chapters, I felt like I lived Clarke’s life in her book. In twenty four chapters, I learnt from year one to year eighteen what a lot of Australians grow up with. I also came to a conclusion of my own. If I were to take a lesson from Clarke’s work, it is that one’s personal tragedies, traumas, and troubles are the spark which lead us to want to create narrative. No matter how much we aspire to write outside of our perspective, or want to inhabit the minds of others, we will always turn back to those lifelong problems, lodged into us during our childhood, those horrific formational years which forced us to write in the first place.

 

** This review is a part of a series of monthly book reviews organized by Kiran Bhat Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American digital nomad, polyglot, and writer who has been to 132 countries, lived in 18 parts of the world, and has learnt to speak 12 languages. He has recently published a book of interconnected voices; we of the forsaken world… If you are interested in what he has to say, please subscribe to his facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/Kiran-Bhat-105125697596856 **

It is first and foremost a thrill when one picks up a novel, and immediately spots out immaculate language. It is like rubbing a plum in the market, to notice that the consistency is firm, and the ashy dots on its colours are speckled throughout. It is practically assured that the first taste, if not the consumption of the entire fruit. will be a supple experience.  And, so, when I first picked up Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I noticed a phrase like “a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling all through breakfast from the loquat trees…” I did not care whether or not the book was a mystery or thriller. I knew Lindsay could write, and that in itself was exuberating.

 

The book itself – its plot – is about the disappearance of a bunch of girls who attend a boarding school after they go to climb a monolith. What follows after is the search, and the media sensation, and the reactions of the parents, teachers, and other school students. Lindsay goes into the aftermath with strong psychological intuitions. People lose jobs as they most likely would given the circumstance, and certain people commit suicide.

 

While the book is absolute fiction, Lindsay frames the book as a work of true story, and peppers the narrative with pseudo-historical references. The book had a conclusion as to what had happened to the girls (involving a time warp, and transforming into animals), but this was excised from the final draft. To be honest, I personally like the Aboriginal allusions to the proper ending, as it intertwines the Victorian Australian narrative with the most quintessentially Austrlaian culture, that of the Aboriginal peoples,  but I also like the added mystery that comes with not knowing. I think that’s also in essence what has made so many people respond to the book. Because it is so open, Lindsay’s novel has been the subject of much scholarly analysis, and has supposedly become part of Australian folklore.

 

As I have said already, one of the first things which made me respond to this book was the language. Lindsay can write, and she goes to extra effort to make sure only the most poetically rendered of descriptions stand (as examples, on page 10, she describes the roof as “covered with rime red dust that seeped through the loosely buttoned curtains into eyes and hair,” or on page ). Practically every paragraph has a well thought-out metaphor. Even if you ignore the plot, it is a great book to simply read if one would want to just observe the beauty of the English language, made beautiful, over and over again.

 

Another thing which I love about the book is the use of humour in the dialogue. The dialogue is so Australian it almost seems like a farce. For example, when Edith explains why she is called Edith, she says “‘Because Edith is my Grandmother’s name… only horses don’t have grandmothers like we do.” and the teacher responds, “‘Oh don’t they just!’” The dialogue is outlandish, and flamboyant, and seems almost to be a depiction of the way Australians speak in cartoons, not necessarily in real life. Of course, one has to remember that this book is set in the early 1900s. It’s not a representation of any shape or form of modern Australia. Given the distance, it is hard to see if Lindsay is relying on a very attuned ear for dialogue, or if she is crafting lines of speech that are only in her imagination. Regardless, I do think it works, because it reminds the reader, almost always, of the quintessential Australian-ness of the situation.

 

Finally, the book is just densely atmospheric. You can feel at the turn of every page that something bad is about to happen, and you just don’t know what. Mystery creeps into every inch of the dust, every layer of the folds, and it remains that way, even long after the central denouement has occurred.  Indeed, from the use of dialogue, to the choice in words, Lindsay’s book is one of the most self-consciously crafted novels I have ever read. And, yet, given the way that so grand of an enigma is created, and yet none of it is revealed, it makes me feel as if all of her effort, so perfectly condensed in under 200 words, has completely paid off.

Crudeness, un-refinedness, unkemptness; what does it mean when literature represents characters not in a moral light, not necessarily even in an amoral light, but in a light that is simply vulgar. And not in the vulgarity of caricature, either; I mean just to represent humans with all of the earnestness of realism, but with the cruelty of crudeness.

 

In The Slap, a gay male spies on a straight man showering, gets an erection, and gets called a fag. In The Slap, women get bent over by their husband, go down to the floor to lick them, and take a second helping. In The Slap, genitalia don’t merely act; they make sounds, hunger, and throb for more. But, The Slap is also really a book about a child, being slapped by an adult, and how the community reacts to it. The story is told through eight short stories that are only vaguely connected (every narrator was at this party at which the boy was slapped, and has something to say about it). And, yet, why does it feel that beyond this one small thing, the titular connections are somehow extremely vague?

 

The slap in question happens in the middle of the first story. It seems to come out of nowhere. Not in that ‘out-of-nowhere’ sense of the phrase, as a slap, or any sort of violence, often surges from. I mean that the slap seems literally to have come out of nowhere, as in there was no choreography that a slap to a child was meant to be a central part of the book. The best books in the world are extremely subtly structured. A great master of fiction guides the reader like a puppeteer. He makes the reader wince when he commands it, he telegraphs every move, even when a reader feels surprised, or heart-stricken. Every moment aches in possibility, despite every second line having a telling quality to it.  This is because the most talented of puppeteers know when to perform, and when to let the work speak for itself.

In the case of The Slap, the slap literally came out of nowhere, and in the seven stories that follow, I felt very little insight as to why it occurred. Almost every character had the same thing to say (a reiteration of, “This character is such a jerk. How dare he slap a child!”). No insight onto how appropriate or not it is to discipline a child in such a way is ever given, no real insight as to how the diverse range of characters, who range in age, ethnicity, and sexuality, but are fundamentally Australian,  would even react to such an action is ever really expounded upon. Instead, the characters go back to having sex, thinking about having affairs, and having sex, once more. It’s like the only thing in Tsolkias mind is a perpetual horniness. But, even that has very little insight to it, beyond giving humans of all genders the right to be sexual in literature.

 

Despite the slap being the framing device that is attempted to give these stories unity, I would say that the real figure of the book is Hector. Hector is Aisha’s husband, and is written to be entirely unsympathetic. He slobbers and pounces in bed, he spends most of his time littering curse words and slurs, and he appears to be having an affair. If there is a Fyodor Karamazov in this book, it might be Hector. However, unlike a central figure in a Dostoevsky novel, I feel like I understand little of Hector’s motivations, and if he in fact has human qualities at all. He seems to only exist to deride and snide others, and not in the melancholic and tragic manners of Felix Grandet or Fyodor Karamazov. To put it in the most blunt of terms, he really just seems to be a jerk.

 

A character who also stood out to me was Aisha. Aisha is a second generation Australian of Pakistani-Indian origin (hence why, of course, I would be more interested). Aisha’s narrative takes place in Bali as she vacations with Hector, and precedes to sleep around with other men, and think about what it means to be married to someone who is unredeemable. I felt that Tsolkias was trying to paint Aisha as a person between cultures, but she came off as a person who was very Australian-minded, and who did not really understand much of Eastern culture. Again, this type of personality very much exists, but it did not seem like a purposeful move. It seemed that Tsolkias was trying to pepper in references that he thought made Aisha appear more Indian in origin, but really came off as contrived. I also did not find her mode of thinking generally relatable. I often felt that Tsolkias seems outside of the female mind as he writes. He gets a kick out of making women sexual in a very grounded way, but it still doesn’t feel grounded to the feminine mentality. If Tsolkias seems like a Greek-Australian trying to write Indian-Australian-ness from a Greek-Australian perspective, he equally seems very much like a male assuming that females internalize sexual need in the way of a male, but just changes the pronouns of the sentences, and assumes that to do all of the work.

 

One thing I will say is that this novel is an extremely authentic depiction of Australian relationships. The women and men are crude to each other in a very realistic way, and I found that Tsolkias’ ear for dialogue sounds more or less exactly like how Australians talk. The book is very clearly in the style of caricature and humour, but there is a cloying realism and attempt at an experimental structure that belies whatever could have been appreciated had it just been a set of short stories exploring Australian domestic life. As it stands, the ordering of the stories make little sense, the slap which throws everything into motion leads nowhere, and the concluding stories, and the concluding lines, give nothing of satisfaction. I would say this work of fiction is an extremely valuable read for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Australian mind, and is also extremely entertaining, but I would also say that it was a book that needed a lot more planning, and workshopping, and dare I say it, introspection, too.

 

* By the way, some of you might notice a coincidence between the title and story of this novel with the recent movie Thappad. I myself am unsure how much the movie was inspired by Tsolkias’ book, but would be curious to see if any of you also see some sense of influence or parallel storytelling between the two works of art.*

 

** This review is a part of a series of monthly book reviews organized by Kiran Bhat Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American digital nomad, polyglot, and writer who has been to 132 countries, lived in 18 parts of the world, and has learnt to speak 12 languages. He has recently published a book of interconnected voices; we of the forsaken world… If you are interested in what he has to say, please subscribe to his facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/Kiran-Bhat-105125697596856 **

There are those vast forms that have informed the cultures of entire nations, but because they are cultures that are rarely discussed in the mainstream, they tend to be relics of a time and history which are often forgotten. As I began Poor Fellow My Country, the Miles Franklin winning novel of Xavier Herbert, I was immediately struck, by his description, of a boy… “Aboriginal… distinctly so by cast of countenance, while yet so lightly coloured as to pass for any light-skinned breed even tanned Caucasian. His skin was cream-caramel, with a hair-sheen of gold…. His nose, fleshed and curved in the mould of his savage ancestry, at the same time was given enough of the beakiness of the other side to make it a thing of perfection. Likewise his lips. Surely a beautiful creature to any eye but the most prejudiced in the matter of race. Indeed, but for knowing the depth and breadth of prejudice against the very strain that gave him perfection, one might well be amazed to know that such a thing could stand the sight of him. Yet most people… would dismiss him as just a boong. He was aged about eight.”

 

This is the first paragraph of Poor Fellow My Country. It is the longest known novel written in Australia, the language is sharp, and compelling, fully in control, and yet, it is both noble, and condescending. This is a book of the 1970s, and it is clear that Herbert, as a white Australian, was trying to do justice to an Aboriginal character. In fact, the whole book is meant to a chronicle of this little boy’s life, a story of how Prindy grows and weathers Australian life in the 1940s, over 1400 pages. And, yet, in the same way that no matter how much we clean our nails, a little bit of dirt gets into the space between the clavicle and the skin, Herbert cannot change the fact that he is a white man writing about an Aboriginal. And it is this very fixed gaze of his, to do good with language, and yet never truly enter the mind of his character, which made this book a most puzzling read.

 

Certain things about, I liked. It is rare to read a work of naturalism from Australia, and much like Ruth Park’s much better Harp in the South, I found myself feeling a sort of empathy for a slice of life I rarely delve into. Herbert has a lot of sympathy and honesty in his writing, and generally he creates well-rounded shades to his characters, a difficulty when one is trying to tell a tale outside of one’s perspective. It is one of the longest books ever written, and from a culture I’m very much a foreigner too. I wanted to like it so much more than I could.

Herbert’s syntax is unrelentingly simple. He writes in short and terse sentences, and he rarely strays from it. Because the style is told in Herbert’s voice and not Prindy, the character feels inanimate. Herbert has a great ear for dialogue, and renders all the different styles of speaking of Northern Australia extremely well. Unfortunately, as someone who doesn’t know the Austrialian dialect of English well enough, his use of apostrophe and broken sentences was a little taxing for me. A lot of it felt too long. A lot of it felt it could have been cut up, or tossed out.

 

After finishing Poor Fellow My Country, I felt like I read a really long book. Not in the sense that I read an epic of literature, which rewards one’s reading time with the philosophical and emotional weight of its world, but instead a book I went through a lot of in order to finish. It was a book I barely understood. It was a book that felt out of place for the story it was trying to write.  I would say that perhaps I am too much of a foreigner in many aspects to be able to fully appreciate this classic, and that is something I have to accept, that not all books are universal, or are open enough to talk on those terms. At the same time, for a book that was trying to go specific into a social problem and give it depth, I wish that it tried harder to give its characters more life. Perhaps not more sympathy, or more thought, but just life.

Regardless, I would still recommend this book, for anyone who wants to read a neglected 20th century classic, for anyone who wants a portrait of the Aboriginal condition through white eyes.