The Wild Lily
A layer of feathers, thin, not yet dropped
that needed a gentle caress
gorgeous and sensitive, they
gave an occasional shiver
someone was mocking the way you spoke
suddenly calling out someone else’s name
no, nothing happened
the echoes having been buried, for a long time, in the valley
野百合
一层薄薄的还没落定的羽翼
需要轻轻安抚
它们斑斓，敏感
时而小颤
有人模仿你说话
突然大声喊一个人名
不，什么都没有
那些回音埋在山谷里很久了
Jiří Orten
Jiří Orten (1919–1941) and Vladimír Holan (1905–1980) are considered today to be among the central figures in twentieth-century Czech poetry. Yet their works have been translated into English far less often than those of their older compatriots, such as Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Franz Kafka (1883–1924) or Franz Werfel (1890–1945). The reason is perhaps that these poets wrote in German, whereas Holan and Orten wrote in Czech. Orten, who like Kafka and Werfel was Jewish (his proper surname was Ohrenstein), was also among the first Jews to write in Czech in the new state of Czechoslovakia, which in 1918 emerged after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
One could not find two more disparate figures in the annals of Czech poetry. At one end Holan, with a poetic life spread over fifty years, and at the other end Orten, whose poetic career was violently cut short just five years after it had begun, in a fatal street accident in August 1941 (he was struck by an ambulance on his twenty-second birthday and died two days later). Yet, there is a dark strand that connects them: the emergence of two demonic forces, one soon after the other, from the horrors of the World War I – namely Nazism and Communism.
Nazism affected Orten directly, by incorporating the Czech part of his country into the German Reich in March 1939, which automatically brought with it the laws for the annihilation of Jews. He managed to publish just three books of poetry, under different pseudonyms; the third of these was discovered and revealed by a Czech collaborator, which triggered a dangerous smear crusade in the Czech fascist press. The work reproduced here, both in Czech and in English translation, is the second of a set of nine Elegies, completed just months before the poet’s tragic death. Holan was affected indirectly, given the danger that the Gestapo could seek him out because of his antifascist poems published before the occupation. His long sequence Dream, from which five stanzas are printed here, again in both Czech and English, is at once an expression of that anxiety and a response to the occupation itself. Miraculously, it escaped the Gestapo’s attention and was even published in May 1939.
After the Communist takeover of the country in February 1948, Orten’s work was banned, being branded ‘poetry of the dying bourgeoisie and the mud of decay’. For Holan, on the other hand, it was a slow but certain march to disaster. Like many other Czechs, he was at first ecstatic when most of his homeland was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. He wrote a solemnising paean of Gratitude to the Soviet Union; this was accompanied by his leaving the Catholic Church and joining the Communist Party. Then, four years later, just one year after the Communists seized power, he protested against the persecution of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and against Soviet influence in the new regime, by leaving the Party and rejoining the Church. As a consequence, his poetry, too, was banned from publication and he withdrew to his home on the island of Kampa on the Vltava river in the heart of Prague. Although after 1954 he was partially rehabilitated, and in later years received a number of awards, he remained on Kampa with his wife and daughter, supported by his friends and the translation work they provided, an impoverished and near-legendary poet-recluse.
Little wonder, then, that I had virtually no knowledge of Holan at the time of my graduation in 1952, and none of even the existence of Orten. They were not mentioned in literature classes at school. I discovered Orten’s poems by chance on a friend’s bookshelf and immediately succumbed to their spell. I was almost the same age as Orten and, like him, a romantic, in love, full of questions about life and death. To Holan I came later, in a second-hand bookshop. Even so, I didn’t start writing my own Czech poetry until 1980. In 1985, nearly a decade after migrating to Australia, I happened to meet the late Australian poet Philip Martin, who encouraged me to write in English and for a while became my mentor. Much later, from 2004, I undertook my first translations of Holan and Orten, and published several volumes of my English versions. Eventually, however, wishing to prepare improved translations of the Elegies and of Dream (as well as of my verse-fantasy The Return of Agnes of Bohemia), I recognised the need to work closely with an English-language poet. This is where, in 2013, Melbourne poet and editor Alex Skovron entered the scene. An account of our longstanding collaboration can be read in an interview on the website of the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA).
Vladimír Holan
Holan’s Dream is a suite of 36 ten-line poems, each adhering to the same strict metre and rhyme-scheme. Written in April 1939 – a year before Orten produced his Elegies and a month after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia – Dream could well be regarded as a Requiem, verbal and musical, the poems’ compressed intensity bespeaking a time horribly out of joint. Orten’s elegies, their rhythms and musicality underpinned by shifting metres, rhymed and unrhymed, are rather in the nature of an intimate lament. The poet broods on his life and fate, farewells his questing youth and his shattered love (for fellow drama student Věra Fingerová). Orten did not live to see the Elegies in print: they were published in 1946, five years after his death.
—Josef Tomáš
Three sisters in the form of a conceit, branch from one another like the limbs of a tree. Three personifications of nature speak from the depths of allegory, rewriting themselves and in the process, reveal our entanglements with the more-than-human world. American poet Megan Kaminski’s stunning new book Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020) poeticises an imagined yet familiar world, transforming our orientations to nature, to cultural history and to the lyrical site of the self. There are many voices in this book of poetry: a cold lake promises to ‘devour with satin tongue’, a sister puts her ear to the ground and ‘listens for the softening of earth’ and snow cover asks to stay a little longer in order to melt ‘white iridescent in blue hours’. But housed within a poetics of care, compassion and connection to the natural world, there are devastations, exposing anthropogenic and commodified views of land. The scarring traces of humanity’s outputs permeate the breadth of this luminous collection as poisoned water flows downstream, wet-lands are drained for subdivision, and hands reach ‘across quarantine zones’. In this interview, Megan Kaminski and I discuss her new book Gentlewomen, her expansive approach to lyric poetry, and the multitude of rich theoretical and poetic influences that interweave her work.
Sophie Finlay: I’d like to start by talking about the genesis of Gentlewomen. Can you tell me how the idea for the book came about?
Megan Kaminski: I guess it all started with Nature. As someone who teaches poetry, I’m always bumping up against allegorical depictions of Nature – and historically, particularly in the English and American poetry tradition, Nature is depicted as a woman who always has stuff (mostly not good) done to her, who is spoken of and to but seldom gets the chance to speak. I saw parallels there to contemporary laws and material conditions that police women’s bodies, words, and actions and continue to deprive them of agency. I was in my 20s and an adjunct instructor, with many of the precarities associated with that position, when I started thinking towards this book, and this all resonated on a personal level. I felt a tension between who I was expected to be within the academic institution, within the institution of marriage, within family structures, and how I was perceived when I spoke and acted authentically, in my attempts to align with values of justice, care, and compassion. Out of that tension, which I started to think of as the tension between gentility and actual gentleness, came the title and conceit for the book. What would happen if Nature was given the chance to speak? How gentle would she really be?
Through research, thinking, and writing, I moved out from my initial connections into a larger consideration of the kinds of resilience that are required of earth’s most vulnerable populations in order to survive – and a recognition of the tolls that labor takes on them. And into frustration with societal values of rugged individualism and the ways they place the onus on individuals to fix things that should be a collective priority. Specifically, I was thinking about the more-than-human world – the plants and animals whose habitats are destroyed and threatened by human activities and their after-effects. And I was also thinking about the labor, and especially affective labor, that is required (and mostly unrecognised) of women on a daily basis – particularly women who provide daily care for children, elders, and others in their community (as opposed to wealthy women with the means to outsource that labor). I wanted to write about care and reciprocity that expands notions of community and kinship. I wanted to write the messy tough exhausting love of resilience.
I was working with my editor Sarah Gzmeski to finalise the book manuscript this spring when COVID came to the US and, shortly after, protests against a brutal string of police murders of Black citizens. I had thought that the book was pretty much complete, but I found myself writing back into the poems as new resonances arose out of the US government’s utter failure to come to the aid of its citizens and the massive transfer of capital from the poorest people living in the US to the wealthiest corporations and individuals. It feels like the Trump presidency has brought the horrors of late capitalism, white supremacy, and environmental exploitation into a glaring spotlight – and that crisis point is very much the moment of the book.
SF: The events of 2020 have certainly exposed the devastating and interlocking oppressions of capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Your work speaks ever more urgently to these crises including the trauma resulting from an exploitative and extractive relationship to the environment. What possibility do you think there is for healing in a broken, diminishing world, and what role does poetry play?
MK: I think there is room for healing – and as well as the need for resistance and revolution. These aren’t separate things. The scale of oppressive systems can be overwhelming, and sometimes it’s hard to see a starting point. However, I think in shifting our own daily orientations towards values of interdependence, kinship, and care, we can find a starting place internally from which to move towards larger change. In her book Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown cites Grace Lee Boggs’s quote, ‘Transform yourself to transform the world,’ and continues: ‘This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.’ This idea of practice is so important. I think that personal practices, creative practices, and social practices are essential for healing and working towards our collective liberation. I thoroughly believe that when we move into right relation with each other on the personal and community levels, and with an expanded notion of kinship that extends beyond blood relations to other human and more-than-human persons, our responsibilities and connections orient us towards collective liberation.
I think that poetry can be a modality for reflection, inquiry, and imagining the world otherwise. In the very act of reading these poems, we inhabit another voice, another breath, another body. Perhaps poetry has always functioned this way, as invitation to take on another. There’s an enchanting and, I think, transformative vertigo in this simultaneity of being both fully embodied and in making way within that embodiment for another. I don’t think poetry is in any way a substitute for direct action – I don’t think poems can free us – but I do think they can give us ways to see and imagine the world differently. I think that is a very valuable thing.
Marilyn Dumont is an accomplished writer and poet of Métis ancestry whose award-winning collections include A Really Good Brown Girl (1996) which received the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the Canadian League of Poets; green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that tongued belonging (2007) which won the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year and Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year; and The Pemmican Eaters (2015) which received the 2016 Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award, which she had previously won with green girl dreams Mountains. Dumont earned her BA from the University of Alberta, where she is currently faculty, and her MFA from the University of British Columbia.
Andréa Ledding: What does it mean to you to be a Métis poet, and what part does your identity, and the history of the Métis people play into that role?
Marilyn Dumont: I never say, ‘I am a Métis poet’. Others might use this. I say, ‘I am a writer, a poet, and I am also a proud Métis.’
This is quite different to state than to say: ‘I am a Métis poet’. That seems to be a lot of hubris, as if there are a long line of Métis poets.
The term poet is inherently subversive and says a lot. It may not signal to most that I advocate for Métis people. Some might think I write flowery poetry about the Métis.
AL: And your poetry is not what I would describe as flowery. It is visceral, real, conversational, observational. Much of it tells your own story within the context of your identity, while The Pemmican Eaters explores major historical figures and moments. Additionally, you are one of the ‘first’ poets who was proudly Métis to emerge in print; what was that like? Can you speak more about the inherently subversive act of being a poet, along with the subversion of having survived attempted genocide of your ancestry and identity? And the act of advocating for Métis people through your poetry?
MD: I was excited and anxious about my first publication because I heard through the grapevine that some family members didn’t like what I was writing. I wasn’t able to ask them why because I had heard it second-hand, but that in itself touched a deep anxiety that I ignored and continued to write.
At the time I began reading, few people knew anything about the Métis other than the entrenched perceptions of the Riel Resistance period, and the focus and popular understanding was that I was Indigenous. End of story. There wasn’t a nuanced recognition of me or my identity. I think people found it an exotic novelty: ‘a real, live Métis. I guess they’re not all dead.’
So, the question is more reflective of the popular culture’s understanding of the 2020s than the 1990s when I wrote and toured A Really Good Brown Girl.
I was drawn to poets because I felt like I fit into their ethos of people who speak up about injustices/contradictions/struggles of trying to consciously live a just and generous life. At an early age, I was outspoken and recognised the power behind speaking one’s truth. I learned that what might be true was frequently not articulated. That was an important moment in my development.
This event in my life and reading lead me to poets and this amazing family of ‘outsiders’ who through their writing asked the pointed questions, made the insightful observations, exposed dehumanising attitudes and practices. Upon reading their work and reading about their lives, I began to feel like I had found – my people. And upon also learning that this ‘family of outsiders’, who I felt akin too, struggled to make a living and that this had been the reality throughout the history of poetic expression, further convinced me that what I was doing was worthwhile and important.
I didn’t know at the time of writing that anything I wrote about the Métis would mean anything or resonate with other Métis, my drive was to find a way to cope with the erasure of the Métis, the oppressive Settler Colonial and Patriarchy. I wrote to survive and keep my spirit alive amidst all the White Noise.
Post publication, did I realise that my words spoke to other Indigenous women, Métis women, and settler women.
So, I didn’t set out to be subversive, it has been part of who I am. It was there when I was a child and that drew me to poets.
For reasons sufficient to the writer, as ‘Papa’ would say, certain places, people and words have been left out of these notes. Some are secret and some are known by everyone. There is, for instance, no mention of the row of shophouses in Bugis Junction, with their 19th Century carvings of flowers and patterned panels and broken wooden shutters, among them his childhood home, that he tore down when he grew up, nor of the jade green and lotus pink Peranakan tiles of a girls’ school, nor of dilly dallying, nor of Mt Sinai and Tan Kim Cheng and Goodwood and Randy Wick, nor of the sour smell of her breath when she kissed me and drank coffee from a condensed milk can and rolled white Gardenia bread into little balls between her fingers and sat and ate with one elbow resting on a raised knee. These notes are the straying and breaking of the root of an utterance, the strange fruit of constraint.
Édouard Levé said when he looked at a strawberry he thought of a tongue. And when he licked it, of a kiss. Levé intentionally levelled semantic hierarchies when he listed his sensations and memories in no particular order. And he could see why drops of water could be torture. Readers now wonder if this sort of aesthetic activism of refusing the ways in which we recognise ourselves was the textual rehearsal of a real suicide. The tongue licking the thought of a tongue looking at a straw berry kissing death.
Catherine Lim said she wrote about strawberries long before she ever saw or tasted one. She made a convincing picnic beside a brook in spring, where she vividly ate strawberries growing on the grassy banks. Was she thinking of a tongue licking another tongue, and was she tortured by drops of water sitting by that brook? Once she wrote ironic stories about Singaporean life that weren’t particularly ironic, but far from being a kiss of death, the stories made her a famous writer, a national treasure. Is national treasure a category that can survive a sharp knife, a bulldozer, a blow to the solar plexus? A solar plexus is a star of nerves.
A strawberry resembles a mouth beginning to say strawberry. A mouth beginning to say anything naturally resembles a strawberry’s impulse to disperse. A mouth beginning to say strawberry is the embouchure of a flutist, the facial anticipation of high sweet melody. But a bassy whisper breaks through closed lips: bree. A middle note has been lost between two utterances.
A mouth saying stroh-beh-ree is exaggerated as a solitary cello. A mouth saying stroh-beh-ree disperses the stacattoed Cantonese intonation and nasal Malay vowels of the flighty sing-song Singlish. Unfashionable and intimate, speaking it and hearing it gives singular pleasure.
Long after she had become decidedly racist and widely banned over there we still kept reading her stories. Naughty Dick had deliberately upset the jug of cream in a fit of anger. Miss Winter the governess punished the unruly child by withholding his share of strawberries and boxing his ears. (That image always reminded me of news of a kidnap ransom, a bloody box of ears arriving in the mail. In Singapore of the 1980s, a set of eight-year-old twins went missing from the nearby McDonalds. Later they were spotted on the streets of Bangkok, Manila, Johor. They were armless child beggars. They had arms but no legs. They were kneeling but couldn’t speak. They were fine. It wasn’t them. They were never found.) Dick felt very sorry. How he wept. ‘Oh thank you very much, Miss Winter!’ They cried upon being granted their lashings of cream. I revelled in the pleasure/obscenity of the good children’s submissive ecstasy.
Strawberry, strewn berry. A semiotic life in the flesh straying against extinction. In the kampung, to fool the gods, Boy is Pig, Dog, Monkey, Girl is Cat, Rat, Tadpole. Unlike her five siblings before her, the child escapes infant death through deliberate misnaming, symbolic trickery, colloquial misprision. Dispensing with death altogether if You never existed. Telling heavenly tales with a single word. Pig. Dog. Buffalo. Water. Earth. Lim.
Like many for whom apotropaic magic was really the unextraordinary lottery of the non-existent- unimpeachable-subpar-promethean-unapologetic Chinese dialect-to-English orthographic efforts of bureaucrats from the Department of National Registration, grandfather was Benny Pang-Fong-Phang-Phung. Similarly, imagine Doong-Toong-Dong-Tung-Tong. (Lacan’s ironic inversion of the Cartesian cogito, ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’, comes to mind.) The national registration of le mot juste is, phonetically speaking, just lemon juice.
Image by Robert Cross
I’ve been trying to train myself out of black. It’s not going well – on the rack my eye still heads that way every time. I know in theory that some colour would suit me better but I seem to be shut in the dark. Summer or winter, happy or sad, black is the new black, and the old black too.
*
I trace my preference for black and white photography to a teenage leaning towards the spare, riddling aesthetic of Zen (not excluding the black robes of the monks and meditation cushions). For a time this fascination extended further east via a large-format edition of the Tao Te Ching that combined original calligraphy with black and white photos of natural forms – shells, trees, waves, birds, pines, grasses, hilltops, snow, and the occasional building isolated in a landscape or against a sky. English translation on the facing page. The one human body in the book was cropped so severely that it resembled a hillside. It struck me even then that this hushed world looked a lot better without us in it. It looked like a place where a human being, if she ever did show up, might find encouragement to be her better self.
*
Perhaps my misanthropic streak was forming even then. Individual humans were fine but, taken as a collective, there were an awful lot of worst selves to overlook. Perhaps these atmospheric landscapes were a way of dodging them. These days I can see the point of joining the Voluntary Human Extinction Club, while also feeling that its counter-reproductive strategy may itself be counterproductive. Aren’t those of us who have the terrible luxury of wishing for the extinction of our own species precisely the ones who should be combatting all the other looming extinctions?
*
I’ve been trying to wean myself, equally unsuccessfully, off black and white prints. To defend this preference, I might say they leave more room for the imagination. As a film is to its novel, so the colour photograph is to black and white: it fixes a person too firmly in the sunlit world, rather than bringing them half-way out of the mind’s dark-room. In colour, the developing seems already complete. Let me dive instead into high contrast black and white, into glimmering silvers and greys.
The black and white photograph suggests a story, the colour photo tells it. Poem vs. short fiction. Or essay.
*
I know I must seem old because I can recall watching black and white TV. (You can see this by the grey I’m still hiding.) Its online afterglow reminds me that memory too once lived in black and white; still pictures rested in albums on heavy black paper, slipped into four translucent corners. Then they were Kodachrome, Instamatic, Leica, gone.
*
Black and white films sometimes laid claim to greater sophistication. Women could resemble moons, moons could resemble people. In early film, silent pointing at the natural world was still possible. Now silent looking is the gift of photographs, their stasis rendering form, balance, contrast, and perspective more readily legible.
*
The Black and White Minstrels Show was a peculiarly English relic of the previous century’s American blackface minstrelsy, made in a world even the lower classes still thought they owned and did not need to understand. Relic of empire’s cabinet of curiosities, its grasping and tenacious Latin taxonomy. Britannia rule the waves, the beaches, rivers, forests and mountains too, all the animal vegetable mineral God-given dominions. Lay your grasping hand on the world. I was airfreighted here as a small child and have lived ever since on streets that overwrote the existing poetry of place with the names of Romantic poets and undistinguished colonial officials. But it has taken decades for my imagination to begin its descent, much less come in to land. For a long time I have lived mid-air, among the clouds, in greyscale.
*
In black and white photography, everyone wears a veil. The allure of silver gelatine. Albumen. Tintype. Photogram. Calotype. The original filters.
*
The grainy glow of historical footage fooled us into overrating our futurity. History as taught here had mostly happened elsewhere, and we thought we had left that glow behind. The Russian Revolution, Alexanderplatz, Nuremberg, Churchill. MLK, JFK, the Cold War, J Edgar Hoover, Angela Davis, then the ‘end of history’. So twentieth century. But the fade was a temporary amnesia, for the black and white of history is back, proving the illusion of progress and the stubborn persistence of division. Misanthropy kindles when what’s most needed is its opposite. Does every history lesson last no more than a generation and a half before it fades into the vanishing point of a switched off tube TV, the flatscreen collapse of a galaxy? Do you remember that show called This Is Your Life?
*
Many of us are still living on empire’s ill-gotten gains and through its fallout. In the Pacific, a temporary concrete coffin built to contain waste from last century’s nuclear testing is beginning to leak. In Aotearoa, thousands of tonnes of aluminium dross left behind in a river town when the company charged with removing it went into liquidation will create a huge cloud of ammonia if (when) floods reach the old factory where it is stored. Nuclear age and extractive industry, meet climate change. Those who left the mess look away.
*
The Tao Te Ching is a work that, among other things, addresses the exercise of power.
The softest thing in the universe Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
*
It’s there in black and white. Meaning, what’s set in type is true. The opposite of mysterious, plain as the nose on your face. Meaning, are you a fool? Meaning, it’s obvious, or you were told. Meaning, didn’t you read the fine print? Water is soft, it eludes fixity.
*
Historians are the epidemiologists of bad ideas, which may seem like outdated diseases until they find their moment to return. A healthy scepticism may turn to distrust of what’s there in black and white, a lesson taught by fraudsters and merchants of doubt, evidence no more trusted now than spin. Is this the post-postmodern, or just the next stop on the slippery slope? When everything is true, and nothing is. How the simple lie turns out to be the most effective. World vanishes into fog. The fox leaves tracks and is not caught.
*
Therefore on the day the emperor is crowned, Or the three officers of state installed, Do not send a gift of jade and a team of four horses, But remain still and offer the Tao.
Roberta Joy Rich | ‘Ek is in ‘n Hoek Vasgekeur/I’m Cornered’, 2013. Multi-channel video installation with wooden table, perspex, identity documents and four chairs. HD video performance, duration 18’30” on 46″ HD screen, with four SD videos, duration 8’00” on four 12″ monitors with four wireless headphones. Installation view, Monash University, MADA Gallery, Melbourne. Final studio outcome of the MFA research project, ‘Oorspronklik’. Image courtesy of the artist.
My work is almost always personal, drawing heavily from my Southern African roots and my experiences as a diaspora woman living in the context of settler nation Australia. My art responds to constructions of race and gender identity; sometimes with satire and humour in the form of video, installation, print-media, textiles, performance and mixed media projects. I use archival, socio-political, media and pop culture materials to explore and engage with notions of authenticity – its relationship to constructions of identity, its forms of representation and in doing so, I hope to re-present histories as a reflexive strategy to draw upon the past and how it informs our present.
Many of my projects are sustained explorations of language and power, and how these forms influence the ways in which one can pass, fail or speak in various contexts. These 15 images of works created over the last 10 years begin with my MFA studio work Ek is ‘n a Hoek Vasgekuer (I’m Cornered) a homage and response to Adrian Piper’s 1988 I’m Cornered video installation, followed by works that focus on ontological questions of self and language that surrounds Brown and Black southern African identities.
These questions have evolved during my practice from introspective explorations towards locating where such language exists, intersecting with repressed histories such as Group Areas Act removals of Apartheid South Africa, Oral histories and Archival documentation of such histories.The Fairest Cape? An account of a Coloured is a series of works made in response to found framed publication covers of essays, pamphlets and catalogues produced by the South African Institute of Race Relations during their extensive occupation of Auden House, now a pending demolition site in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Such histories inform the complex battles of our ancestors and intergenerational radicalism that allows me to present both the problems of the oppressive systems that silence Bla(c)k people and their stories, but simultaneously speak to their power, strength and resilience.
And the old men’s hair style is the same –
parted partway from the temple
curling silver grey blonde
wave slick with Brylcreem.
And the cancer skin of these men
flushes pink in the Filipina bars
old and flaming, shirts open like
Miami-Hollywood-Down Under men.
And they say it’s too early for the barongs.
That you Pull that shit in the villages,
where the girls are young and dumb
cos those pineapple clothes will kill ya.
And in the hotels, we see them –
lazy ugly popped out guts cackling
about little brown fucking machines.
But the girls get pushed from behind
from families in nipper huts in provinces
and rubbish mounds in barrios.
The girls say, Hey Joe, guapo guapo
and the men smile stupid stupid with San Miguel
and show off square wallets fat with pesos
and photos of Mercedes with the top down
and caravans on edge of the bush.
And the women practise saying woop woop
and the men say we’ve had enough rice to be Chinese,
and they say come back with me sweety
and see my fast car for fast women
and their arms lump over them like damp clothes.
Science insists where salt goes
water follows, which accounts
for the distended body of
the beached whale found along
the coast of Camarines Sur.
When they split its carcass open,
a gush of plastic cups and salt
poured out. The townsfolk, thinking
it was of extraterrestrial origin,
mistook the beast for a fallen god.
They began to weep and wail.
Some offered flowers around it.
Left to rot in the sun for too long,
it gave off a strange smell that reached
the farthest end of the island.
The Igohang tribe of Ifugao
keeps their dead inside a nipa hut
by swathing them in blankets.
Bodies remarkably intact bonewise,
squat legs bowed, as when they found
Bayangan Limangya on a chair,
rigor mortis already setting in.
In November, when it gets cold,
they take out the desiccated bones
to warm in the sun, or let children
acquaint themselves with their elders.
Some say that Apo Anno,
revered mummy of Benguet
and thought to be son of a goddess,
had to drink Sabut Bit Sea
to preserve his body.
We watch this on the Internet.
Already, I feel you drifting away
as we fall by the wayside of love.
Your eyes scoping out the screen
to disinter clues to the occult.
Science has no answer for this yet.
We are still years and years behind.
I only believe this to be true:
You are salt and I am water
in this great sea surrendering.
Wherever you go, I follow.
It’s 28 April 2020
and my husband shows me a video
of his cousin growling
from the pit of his lungs
at his two-year-old son:
You’re arrested for being brown.
The son runs, a question
mark for a face.
You’re arrested for being brown.
His father seizes him
playfully, then sets him free.
You’re arrested for being brown
over and over
You’re arrested for being brown,
until the son gets what he is
supposed to do: bend over
the bed with his hands behind
his back, even before he gets grabbed.
My husband laughs. I write
a poem; can only regurgitate:
You’re arrested for being brown.
I strip
search for woman
but there is only girl. A constant
vigil of unwanted hair for removal.
I tame
fur lined lips traced to Mediterranean
roots− threatening to unravel
a farce constructed to fit.
I betray
flesh razed in wax strips
fleecing skin & hard-won purse.
− a depilation identikit.
I detangle self from family
trussed to tresses. An isolation
of foreign threads.
The aesthetic dictates a glabrous lip
centrefold− in a denuded line-up
under duress.
Chinese people have a concept of ‘face’
somewhere between reputation and fancy airs
and just as invisible and omnipresent
Growing up in Australia
I struggled with the faces to put on
the invisible prison of expectation
and differences in values as simple as respect
it wasn’t earned, it came with being older
and you had to abide by rules that came from your elders
even the one forbidding ice cream during your period
It would be easier to commit murder
than to get permission for a sleepover
It was easy to commit manslaughter
because everything that caused your parents’ heartbreak
would kill them, they would die
from the shame
So I tried to blend in
I begged my mother for a lunch that didn’t smell
studied hard and didn’t fool around
knowing the gossip from aunties in the streets
would come back home like a boomerang
After a certain age, you’re told don’t ever date boys
yet they want a grandson to spoil
Boys are better, they carry the family line
Asian boys are preferred partners
it’s okay to marry a white boy
but don’t ever admit to liking brown or black boys
Remember to wear sunscreen
because you wouldn’t want to be brown
You might be mistaken for a domestic helper
I was raised by one when I was a baby
I had a second mother
in a place that I don’t name
you never talk about it
because your coworkers told you
it’s weird
i
We begin with a desire to devour.
I am a citizen of want, my body
a country of bruises from your teeth.
I am happy to pay in sweetness
as long as it is you who takes
my lips. Once, upon coming
to a clearing, we hurriedly shed
our clothes, feral things whose
vocabulary knows no waiting.
I am happy to be here before you,
palms up, wanting and being wanted.
Once more, and once again.
ii
Someone once took me to bed
and wanted to fuck in the dark.
I was a body and yet not a body.
Someone mistook me for not being
me when they read my words but forget
my name. Where do I hide my shame?
I was a body and almost somebody.
We damn well know: to be brown is
to always be guilty of being brown.
iii
Who wouldn’t want this,
hands around my throat,
hands that cup my breasts,
hands that grip my hips.
Let me whisper confessions
to the shadows on your skin:
When I see your open mouth
I hear the selfsame howl from
deep in my womb: I am your
leviathan among the woods.
iv
This is what it means to shiver
beneath someone’s gaze,
your possession teaching me
the length of my spine.
Who wouldn’t want you,
telling me you’re home
and safe from standing
before an invisible firing line.
In the subway, at the pharmacy,
at the grocery, in the park:
when have we ever known
what it means to be apart.
No one can stop me
from holding your hand,
not even the demons that
corrupt their heart.
v
Would that there be a menagerie
inside your warm body for every
living thing that you might have been:
the tenderness of a butterfly, perhaps,
or the startling softness of a bird.
A sweet longan.
vi
How do you conjure
an ever after. I wish
nothing more than
to follow where this leads.
Our bodies uncurl from the core
and everything hurts
while we stand in line at the bank,
or when we walk across the street
to get to our door.
When they call you names
or when they call mine,
I will always want you
whispering in my ear:
Why not right here.
vii
Oh, husk that houses who I am!
Almond eyes, thick thighs,
and every ember that has
settled on my dark skin.
I want your wildness—
and damn the rest of them.
Mostly I just thought it was a really funny character
my ears were the first to leave
heading off without packing anything
lobes tired of hanging on waiting
to hear something different
tired of listening to
the same old
same old
I think I’m pretty brave with putting myself out there and looking stupid and doing things that are potentially
offensive
My eyes saw my ears take off
saw how easy it could be
without a slight or doubt in sight
to not have to watch
over and over
the same old
same old
It’s kind of funny that there’s only certain races that it’s an issue
My hands grew tired of holding on
reaching out for tomorrow
nails bitten to the quick
by my anxious mind
palms furious
the same old
same old
I’ve already gone far enough with the blackface thing — I can’t go much further.
The last things to leave were my feet
my heart my mouth my wairua
stuck around keeping my brown skin
good company
it will take time for
the new old
new old
| |
SKIN |
HOMELAND |
GOLD |
BODY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MEANING |
warm brown earth turning over // end of the rainy season |
বাংলােদশ // the space where we were planted |
sunlight passed down from wrist to wrist // translated: “a gift for you” |
the aperture that our ancestors inherit |
| SYNONYMS |
truth, motion // growth, carambola see also: gold, body |
lychee flesh, blood spilt for a language see also: body |
honey, spark, summer see also: skin, stolen |
the first incision into a lychee’s skin see also: homeland |
| ANTONYMS |
paint, mimicry, false body |
rewritten memories; burnt histories // colonised bodies |
glass, temporary |
ego, land lying fallow, cheap mockery |
| GREAT LOVES |
healing; sweetness // slowness |
birdsong, mustard oil, storytelling |
the shape of a jhumka // the chiming of small bells |
celebration // Brown Joy |
(kiskis kuskus/
kiskis kuskus)
rub your skin with
glutathione soap
until it rips the veins
in your blood
erase every spot,
as if robbing every
line of your
generation’s fate,
tell me –
so you would want to have
the same undertones
as your grandparent’s
oppressors?
tell me –
in your skin
bleached with
the idea of race
to being
to belong
they’ve taken away what
is supposedly yours.
and now what is yours will
never be supposedly whole.
I was drunk I was sitting in the sand I was thinking about the past my children my country the mines I was drunk and I was not careful not thinking barely awake in the close to midday sun the sun the country the fires my loved ones I was crying at some point but a man shouldn’t cry I was just drunk and singing I threw the bottle at a car at a house at a window I was miserable but it was good to throw the bottle the glass shattered the glass made a noise I wanted to set something on fire but no I wouldn’t I wouldn’t do it to my country my country which is nothing like it used to be I was drunk that’s all I wasn’t harming anybody I was having a good time by myself everyone left me I used the last twenty dollar I had to buy myself a bottle just one I saved the rest for later I had forethoughts I thought of the future unlike what they say I think I do think about the future anyway the day was getting on I saw some kangaroos crossing the road they went for the lawn life is easy for them if they hang around towns there are grasses I was thirsty I went to the drinking fountain it was out of order so I went for the bottle though it didn’t quench my thirst I roamed about singing I was thinking I was thinking about the deaths and suicides amongst our peoples I was feeling sad I was feeling bad for them I was drinking to buy myself an hour a minute of peace I was drinking because it was the only way but sometimes I get angry I get angry and start throwing bricks I am so miserable I throw bricks at those white flash houses fancy courtyards the church I was sleeping against a tree when they came and got me they handcuffed me and threw me into the back of a white van the sun was high the sun was high I was riding it was getting hot in there I banged on the sides I banged on the hot white steel let me out let me out let me out I hollered and the white fellas kept cursing and I kept cursing and the sun was getting higher and I was getting higher and I flew at the walls I flew at the prison I built for myself I banged my chest against it I banged my head against it and then it all got so much I couldn’t breathe I couldn’t holler no more I kept roasting and roasting in the heat I kept turning and turning on the floor I got tossed back and forth like a tennis ball I sweated I stank I asked for something to drink blood on my head blood on the floor blood flooding my eyes I thought about the color of the sand how I would have loved to dig my body into the coolness underneath and I kept dreaming and dreaming until suddenly I stopped and I was where I wanted to be in the sand and in the earth in the trees and in the leaves in the winds and in the sun dancing with the elements with the spirits with those that came before me with the whole universe and I was simple and I was clean and I was happy and I was happy
and I was happy
I longed for a chameleon life,
my brown rind most seemly for family gatherings,
peeled with the telling and retelling
of myths and collusions
from the old country,
for the gifting of clay pots and gold
from aunts who’d returned,
suitcases bulging with the foreign-familiar,
inscrutably sable like the mustard seeds
in my mother’s kitchen,
white for school,
for loitering underage in bars, near railways,
in packs selected by popularity,
milky as college captains
blessed with sameness and blue eyes,
as undeniably wasp-toned as Marsha Brady,
I bled for the melting pot,
watched red turn to rust,
humbly explained my origins at soirées,
wanting mostly to slip
the coat my ancestors bestowed
with its dark buttons stitched shut
and me, captive, perspiring
inside the Melbourne grey,
my cinnamon breast
in a lover’s grasp,
his fingers stretched like lily-manacles,
stark against my hide,
dragging me out of the east
into a decadent west
with all its comfort
and discomfort.
Drip, drip, drip; dollars, democratic, bling.
Blood, blood, crip; homophones: cell, celery, steel.
Because it would let you carry off hot pink
the way the black models do, the way I do,
I meet your light face with confusion
I feel rivers rise under my cheeks
in this wide and sunburnt country
what colour should dark people blush?
I don’t know why I pause before I tell you
that the man who plays the didgeridoo
on Bourke street called me sister.
They think you’re one of them lot!
you say and mimic my head-shake
your eyes roll like earth marbles.
Later, my desi friends bristle too,
all fellow savarnas thinking:
It’s one thing for white people
to see only our colour and race
(not our high and pitiless birth)
but for “them” to think we are the same!
Here in hot Christmases, you daub zinc
on your face like grandfather’s caste marks
just as easy to wash off
Strange camouflage, I thought, because
it just makes you whiter in this brown land;
litmus that shows you don’t belong.
You don’t need the sunscreen, mate you said
Surely you get enough sunshine over there?
But no, it singes us too, some of us,
coffees too hot, poppies too tall and ruddy,
My brown skin, sure, dark enough for pink
but flecked with inherited prejudice
melanoma from both our suns.
And what does it say about us,
That we turn
And turn
And turn
Turn a funeral into a festival, a spectacle,
Because mourning feels too heavy, dark spots
On our already dark skins.
We cast off headscarves in fear, force ourselves
To watch as others claim them,
A misplaced notion of
Solidarity.
Do not show how this hurts.
We are the ‘good ones’,
Who always forgive
Our murderers and our saviours,
Sometimes both the same.
Do not let them see any moment
Of weakness, of anger, of emotion. Instead,
We school our sorrow and our rage
Into something more…
Acceptable, palatable,
Something that would make them say
“See, these are the good ones.”
“They are one of us.
They are us.”
The names of the dead are lost, whispers
In the chatter around politicianscelebrityactivists,
Vying to outdo one another
In this new exercise of publicity.
Is this what it means, to be “one of us”?
To have our pain leave our lips and float away,
Unheard, instantly lost and forgotten,
Forgotten, like the reason
People have gathered in the streets:
Supporting you in this difficult time
Thoughts and prayers for your community
Aren’t you glad you are here, where it’s safe?
They are here
Not to bear witness, but to be witnessed,
To take up even more space
So we,
And our grief,
And our rage,
May not be seen or heard
Unless we fit the bill,
Unless our bodies and our stories
Are displaced, replaced,
By this single one:
This is not us
This is not us
This is not us
But it is.
My mixed body is a battleground.
17 years of bloodshed, the source slyly
laying in my epidermis. (My melanin an atom bomb)
I imagine the successful egg and sperm did not
Join, merge or unite- but
Shoot, destruct, colonise, subjugate
A coloured baby born in war:
Wreaking havoc, leaving carnage
By outward appearance.
My parents wear blue helmets, assuaging
Tension between grand-parents.
I marauder through their homes,
A vestige of the 2003 massacre when I
Was born a bit browner than they expected.
Unsalvageable, yet I am sequestered to the shade,
Bequeathed strong sunscreen like a reluctant peace treaty
Victory is pyrrhic when I intentionally tan
Youthful sedition manifesting in lackadaisical hours
Under the relentless terroristic sun. But
appeasement is over, peaceful co-existence with mind and body
-no more- as I crave the bounty of Brown skin.
I understand my privilege: the ability to
Wear my lineal heritage and be seen
For better or for worse, this is my gain:
Ancestral connection won each glimpse in the mirror
Brown skin is my shining armour.
for Ariana
daydreaming in togs, day-napping
on blow-up mattresses in winter sun—
we could barely hear ourselves over the battering ram
of birdsong. an island pigeon
flew low over our bodies as we
tried to spot the willy wagtail camouflaged
in canopy. we lay top-tailed, all
gooseflesh and belly-laughs.
if this sand could, it would
speak in sighs.
