Greta Thunberg Ode

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Dominic Symes

children the size of adults
pester me with questions like

how big is your carbon footprint?

I mean yes
I’m a minor poet

not a major corporation

but I’d still prefer being
taken to task by someone
with a stake in the future

over being taken to court

watching the lawyers
stride in
& out of the stone building

from the shade of this
frankly arrogant tree
resplendent with carbon

there is a whiff of the
entitlement that comes off
a certain kind of person
who when asked

still or sparkling

answers

sparkling
or
something equally
as bougie

—is firing off tweets
as bad as burning down
forests?

I mean
I get it
some kids don’t want to have to
think about the anthropocene

they want gazelles
jordans

they want supreme

I
on the other hand

grew up
climbing trees

barefoot & in rags
swinging off
the fig trees
outside the zoo

a real Mowgli figure
of inner suburban Adelaide

imagining the tree
was my mother

or at least the female
tree-character from
Pocahontas

(…Grandmother Willow, but I had to IMDb it)

when
you stop to think
for a minute
that’s a strange film

I mean
from a contemporary perspective

there’s settlement
& the reek of entitlement
not to mention
the extensive
land clearing

plus it stars

Mel Gibson
before he got cancelled

for saying those
awful things about
Jewish people

—my point being

can the market
really be relied upon
to even all of this out?

to absorb our
stupidity
the way trees
absorb our carbon
from the
atmosphere?

can a pouch of tobacco
costing $36
really stop someone
from smoking?

can e-cigarettes?

can this 36 degree day
lived here
that could be anywhere
somewhere in
the golden age of capitalism?

golden
in the way that
a plant turns golden when the sun
had voided it
of its moisture?

golden
in the way
we tend
to convince ourselves
things are beautiful
even as they’re
dying
right in front
of our eyes?

I’ve been
having better conversations
since accepting this
perennial state of
emergency

reading about the school
protests & watching Greta
Thunberg videos on youtube

accepting the
solution will not be simple
or easy

as unpalatable
as it tastes

this soy latte
is not the solution

with the newspaper
in front of me
which I’m sure
almost no one my age
or younger
is reading

the editorial suggests

maybe plant a tree?

or get a sodastream?

failing that
their logic would
advocate

just go back to work
as normal?

& if you don’t have a job

buy one?

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Concerning Divination (2)

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Shastra Deo

For most of my life I’ve been right
about omens. Salt, ravens. Red skies at morning.
Rocks thrown against the wind. A six
pack ring found in the vicinity of a sparrow’s nest
suggests three loves before marriage. A robin’s egg: split
ends. Stones skipped over an oil-slicked lake are lucky—luckier
still by an evening bonfire, flame
licking the corner of a clamshell
punnet of strawberries. To be born
on uranium-rich soil is to say something about granite, sunflowers,
polymer. The transfiguration of telluric into human
object. A prophecy is only as good as its seer, and no witness
is ever on time.

Today I was divining the melt point of a bulk bag:
the heat required to spur an entanglement of matter, amalgam
of polypropylene and Fukushima soil. The time it takes to write
radiance into rock. What remains
after passing is plastiglomerate, pressure, and the cascade
that rots caesium to barium. What departs is various.
It was many years ago, now, when a stone was just a stone.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Alyson Miller Reviews berni m janssen’s between wind and water (in a vulnerable place)

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Alyson Miller

between wind and water (in a vulnerable place) by berni m janssen
Spinifex Press, 2018


In ‘speaking out’, the final poem of berni m janssen’s fifth collection, between wind and water (in a vulnerable place), a choral cry for resistance is offered, a lyric that insists on the ability of individuals to provoke immense change: ‘one voice small forms fight in strength / one voice strong gains another / i’m with you, go boldly’. In a context of climate strikes and impassioned environmental activism, such lines might be attributed to Greta Thunberg, whose reminder that ‘you are never too small to make a difference’ has become the slogan of protestors worldwide demanding action against an impending ecological crisis.

Yet between wind and water speaks of a different kind of truth to power, one which explores the detrimental consequences of climate change solutions that have otherwise been framed as a panacea to the polluting ills of industry. Examining the complex repercussions of the installation of wind turbines in a small rural community, the collection has been described by Javant Biarujia as a ‘cautionary tale’, revealing the nuanced conflicts of corporate vs. community interests while the plundered earth is leached, and can no longer provide. In its analysis of the ways in which battlelines are drawn, between wind and water presents a vision of discord and loss, an image of a landscape and its tormented inhabitants that is rendered by greed, silence, and disillusionment.

Multi-vocal and multi-layered, this collection is comprised of a series of oppositions, not only between the corporate-speak and enviro-savvy gurus who insist on the safety of the turbines and the community which seeks to resist them, but also in relation to ideas about the natural and the material world. Such tension is neatly encapsulated by the figure of Dan—one of over twenty-one characters and voices in the narrative—who as a farmer and poet embodies a mythic, if not mysterious, Australian archetype reminiscent of Banjo Patterson or Henry Lawson—a man of the land who is also in tune with a profoundly Romantic sensibility. Characterised as a ‘steward’ who desires little more than to live ‘full prosperous happy […] without end forever and a day’, Dan presents as a battler aligned with spaces he inhabits, yet keenly aware of the increasing separation between the human and non-human. It is a distance marked by a progressive series of haiku in which Dan observes the physical and psychological impacts of the turbines on the community: ‘south west wind blows hard / another letter of complaint sent / as if hands crush skull’. The intrusion of technology creates an atmospheric shift that results in a sense of suffocation and disquiet, making the ‘body buzz ears hum’, an unseen, creeping force that unravels and confuses: ‘am all over the shop’. In a sequence by fellow anti-windmill activist Vera, whose ‘living is with the earth’, the disruption of the turbines is vividly imagined as an anxious threat that invades the bodies of its victims: 

They know their bodies pulse, quiver and twitch, the pressure
and pain, in ears, head, chest, all tightening, they know this as 
what has happened and still happens, from day to day, night to
night, not every day every night, but never before the turbines

The industrialisation of the landscape is thus conceived in intimate terms, worming inside the minds and bodies of those who live within its vicinity. In the poem ‘Mattie’, the eponymous narrator describes a state of disquiet in which she ‘can’t settle today can’t settle / wind in my bonnet bees on breeze’, an image of jittery restlessness, but also of being imposed upon by a greater force. The effects on self are ‘jangle jarred’, an experience of agitation and loss in which ‘things don’t stick in my head neither pin nor word basic / structures articulated imprecise’.

Catherine Schieve notes in the afterword—an oddly explicatory addition—that such portrayals demarcate the careful balances maintained by the ‘fragile landscape’, an ecosystem which ‘includes our very own bodies, as the work of capitalism affects everything down to our dreams at night’. The invasion of the ‘industrial windmills’ throws the machinations of the natural world into chaos, creating a constant friction between object and subject, each fighting for space in the bionetwork. As Dan writes in ‘early autumn’: ‘fingers of pale light / turbine blades locked together / cannot concentrate’.

Importantly, each of the embattled residents is presented in relation to a singular, extraordinary connection with the natural world, enamoured by a quasi-spiritual understanding of land awarded to those in rural spaces and denied to those on the outside. It is a question of ownership, made clear in the animosity towards the governmental agents and advocates who are unable to explain the phenomena: ‘complaint no 315 draws mister grey suit / thirtysomething urban company tool slickster / this not his territory’. Such binaries are mimicked via the performative language of janssen, whose remarkable conjuring of movement and sound replicates not only the invisible peril that menaces the community, but also the positions from which each actor speaks. As Schieve observes, janssen constructs ‘a full theatre of voices arranged in space’, a cacophony of accents, jargon, and quirks that synthesise into an intricate expression of corporate-lingo, outrage, and grief. More formalised structures and rhyme schemes are reserved for representatives of The Company, for example, who revel in cropped clichés and weasel-words to parody bureaucratic emptiness and repetition without meaning: ‘I’m here to listen, to listen to you, to listen to your concerns. Yes, really listen. Listen really. A real listening’. Alternatively, the opening section, ‘Still’, narrated from the perspective of the landscape, is constructed of long fluid lines and lists, eschewing static choruses in favour of language that is alliterative and verb-heavy, echoing a sense of seasonality, transformation, and impermanence: ‘small feet tickle my dust print into decay a lace of living strung from tails swooping bounding switching surface to air fleet the colour the pattern the texture each to their own and of their passing they home in me guests’. Similarly, in evoking the horror of the windmills, the source of so much dis-ease, janssen attends to a sense of perpetual, fragmented motion, a nauseating refrain of clipped and frantic energy: ‘they spin do spin spun spin spin spin forward, do spin around round spin forward round whirred spinning turning spun spin sizzling speed fast’.

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Introduction to Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Bonny Cassidy


BUY YOUR COPY HERE

I’ve noticed that Prithvi Varatharajan thinks carefully about offering a true gesture, word or position in every social exchange. I sense that, for him, all communication is an art defined by authenticity rather than decadence. His reflective nature is continuous with the character of the poetics in Entries. The book is a performative documentary of ‘processing’. Its poems refine our social condition into a dramatised, lyricised, essayistic motion of thinking out loud.

There’s a metafictional aspect to this mode of Varatharajan’s work. Its speaker refers to being Prithvi but we should remember that the title of the collection is ironic; these are not simply ‘entries’ in a journal or a log. They have been edited over many years. They are, after all, framed as poems, which is a hint that we ought to be attuned to their craft, particularly their rhythmic and sonic qualities, particularly their line.
I can’t describe Varatharajan’s poetics without reference to his scholarship and work in audio production. It’s revealed by the way that his speaker often becomes detached from one or more of his senses.

‘I was moving my knees and my head to and fro,’ he writes, ‘so it seems I was enjoying the music’, as though listening could be experienced as a Cartesian deduction. The rhythm of his prose is not really metric, but more like a refined conversational variation of longer ruminations and staccato asides. He is particularly good with the silence that follows the final full stop, like that beat of dead air that finishes a recording, or a comfortable pause in dialogue.

It’s invigorating, the ease with which Varatharajan alternates between prose and enjambed verse. It reflects the way his poems toggle between moods. Some of his entries resemble Romantic epigrams and fragments, whereas others are mini-essays. The enjambed poems included here – often ‘small r’ romantic in attitude – create emotional and spatial punctures. Their voice is more immediate, more impulsive than their prosaic neighbours. They reveal the quixotic heart that makes the brain run.

If there’s a narrative tendency throughout the collection, it would be towards scenes of sign-reading. The speaker is often to be found deciphering not only literary or semiotic signs, but also the cues of body language and vocal tone, as well as cosmic signs like coincidence and premonition. In the opening poem, for example, the speaker mentions moving house, ‘which I think was last night’. There is an almost psychedelic sense of possibility in this aside. The question it raises is of greater philosophical consequence than flawed memory or unreliable reality. The speaker’s uncertainty might be ‘environmentalist or anti-modern’. It throws him into a dilemma of capitalist dependency. As he asks in another poem, ‘What are the risks of everyday living’? This quandary is filed away for future consideration.

These poems remind us, maybe, of our better selves. These poems do not drink and dial; they do not hit ‘send’ too soon. In this manner they are a balm to current hyperactive expectations of social responsiveness. Paradoxically, Varatharajan does this by emphasising the provisionality of our being social animals. Entries not only registers so many types of everyday (but by no means banal) oscillation, it seems to revel in them. He openly invites us to celebrate this slow suspension as the most honest position: ‘I am king of ambivalence, so I’m king of being human.’

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Introduction to John Mukky Burke’s Late Murrumbidgee Poems

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Melissa Lucashenko


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John Mukky Burke – one of my favourite philosophers – is the most underrated poet in Australia. His usual lacerating intelligence and empathy are here in this sensational collection, but ‘exuberance’ is the word that keeps occurring to me as I read. Burke is a poet who, in maturity, has shed many masks and is the better for it. He revels here in the godawful, funny, earthy business of being alive on Country today. Sex and death dominate (‘when a cock approached a cunt’), with detours down any manner of kangaroo pads. And there’s bold new authority in his voice, too:

Who said something about someone somewhere somehow
caring for a sparrow? Didn’t you fucking know that?

‘My Sister and I Get Our Mess of Pottage with a Small Kid Dead on Mr Boynton’s Double Bed’ tells of a stark rural childhood. There is zero pathos and no dogma; rather, a blunt country voice, reporting:

No one ever said to me not to go there,
not to see, not with the house full hushed with crying, and the dead
child frozen, laying on the bigger bed and in the back room, congealing
porridge in the kitchen spoilt with tears and snot,
yours cold, mine not. I left you there, and could stare at only death
right in the arse.

Similarly in ‘Warts, an Extract’, an old man reflects on his life, then and now: ‘No toilet, no mattress, no primus, no kero … And now I can type on computer, Jesus!’

Burke has dialled the dryness up to eleven, and by Christ it can be funny. As a young teacher, stuck, Burke got his kids in the Northern Territory some Kiwi penpals:

One girl over the Tasman wrote something that ran almost exactly like this: There five people in my family: me, my mum and dad, my younger brother and my grandmother, but she’s dead at the moment.

There is always death, of course, and worse, for ‘we people who have walked at midnight have seen a great delight of pain’. But death and pain are no more than components of the great game. Proudly Wiradjuri after battling his white skin for years, openly gay after decades of closeted torment – Burke’s pen crackles with energy in Late Murrumbidgee Poems. I busted out laughing at the excoriating ‘Happy Wagga, an Overview’.

The collection covers vast territory, from the insufferability of colonial explorers (‘Cook Was Not an Anthropologist’) to experimental work in the voice of a religious petrol sniffer. I was delighted to find included here my favourite Aboriginal poem, ‘Poem for the APEC Ministers’. In ‘Zac’, Burke speaks lovingly as an elder to a younger Koori man (‘with the blackest eyes’) struggling with life and in denial of his aboriginality.

The natives of Turtle Island tell that, collected, poems and stories are medicine bundles. They feed us and give us courage. This collection is just such a medicine bundle, but it’s more than that. It’s a kangaroo skin scraper passed to us from the hand of a master wordsmith and intellectual giant.

Hold it close.

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Introduction to Astrid Lorange’s Labour and Other Poems

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Justin Clemens


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This book is titled Labour and Other Poems. Just as Astrid Lorange speaks of building a poetics – intensive and intentional – as a way of perceiving the world of relations in their shadow, every poem here requests an attentiveness to the multiple relations of our lives, to the entwining of senses and references.

Labour is a word that enters English from Old French, where it not only means ‘task’ or ‘exertion’ but ‘hardship, pain, affliction, misfortune, suffering, distress.’ Labour is a word that cuts across all traditional divisions of, well, labour, insofar as it designates at once childbirth, ‘the sublime and violent history of reproduction,’ and hard yakka, the foundation of production. Almost always and everywhere, Lorange reminds us, this labour is extorted and expropriated: birth slavery and wage slavery and slavery tout court.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt makes a distinction between labour, work and action. Each corresponds to a basic condition of being-human: labour corresponds to the biology of the body, to the condition of life itself (‘nature’); work to the unnaturalness of human activity (‘culture’); finally, action takes place specifically within and between the plurality of human beings, for being human is not to be human like any other human (‘politics’). Labour concerns life and the life of the species; work, the production of things that persist beyond mortal lives; action, the production and place of history itself. Arendt famously identifies natality – the entrance of the new life into the world – and not mortality – being-towards-death – as the motor of all values in their constant revaluation. Labour, as Lorange writes, both with and against Arendt, the labour, never finishes.

This too is part of the labour of poetry. ‘Toast for Friendship’ concerns secret organisations and their politics of friendship. Like the CIA, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt considered that the essence of the political was the power of deciding on an exception, and that such an exception entailed the formation of friends and enemies. What does toast mean here? Stéphane Mallarmé wrote a famous ‘toast’ or Salut, a poem of greeting and celebration to his poetic friends. But toast is not only a form of delicious fire-charred bread, nor a public salute to outstanding persons or deeds, but a demotic idiom meaning ‘destroyed, decimated’. In an Australian context, think how ‘Toast’s penumbra of significations – grains and alcohols and vast aggressions – are correlates of the invasion of the wheat eaters. And the remnants are everywhere: take ‘Ex’, which proposes a kind of molecular pheromonology, of abiding if often imperceptible micropolitical affects.

Oddly, labour is also a collective noun for a group of moles, e.g., ‘a labour of moles’. In Hamlet, Shakespeare’s eponymous hero acclaims his father’s ghost in such terms: ‘Well said, old mole, canst work i’ th’ earth so fast? A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends’. Labour, law, life and friendship are thus linked. This image of the old mole that burrows unseen and unknown, clandestine, beneath the soil of the symbolic, impressed the German philosopher G W F Hegel, who invoked it to characterise the labours of world spirit; in Hegel’s wake, Karl Marx picked it up to designate the labour of revolutionaries in The Eighteenth Brumaire; for her part, Rosa Luxemburg used it to propose the slogan ‘Imperialism or Socialism!’ These moments are also part of Lorange’s labours:

Patriots, says the CIA, should be wary of
poetry: it can be revolutionary but not even
feel like it.

It’s time we started really feeling like it.
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Andy Jackson Reviews Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word

Posted on December 19, 2019 by Andy Jackson

Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word
Edited by David Stavanager and Anne-Marie Te Whiu
University of Queensland Press, 2019


Is an anthology greater than the sum of its parts? Does it effectively capture its milieu? Who’s been included, who left out? Is it genuinely of the moment? Will it endure? The case of Solid Air is even more complex. This is a collection of spoken word that’s been published as a book, rather than as a downloadable album, a film to be streamed, or a live show on tour (though there have been a string of impressive launches). Voice turned to ink, accent and emphasis turned into font, the unfolding of a poem in time turned into a presence on paper which is there in its entirety at one glance. Is this the stage surrendering to the supposed dominance of the page? Should I consider these poems purely in their physical form here, or as reminders of their performance elsewhere? Of course, editors David Stavanger and Anne-Marie Te Whiu know you’ll ask these questions, and it’s proof of their adept curation of voices that – while such questions persist after reading, transformed into something more productive – the poems themselves overwhelm any theoretical position or argument about what or who this anthology represents.

Firstly, a disclosure: I was chosen by the editors to perform at the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2017. I don’t appear in this anthology, though, so perhaps that balances any perceived bias. What Solid Air does so powerfully is remind us that poems involve positions, a precarious and essential bridging of sites, a profound resonance between bodies, such that the reader or audience is unavoidably implicated. The cover illustration by Des Skordilis is emblematic – four hands, of various skin tones, grasp a single pencil, whose lead becomes a microphone lead looming in the face of the reader. The opposite of siloing, this is a poetics of coming together, the potential for solidarity. Contrary to the image, however, rather than one microphone, the anthology contains 120 of them. And it’s partly in the juxtapositions of voice, not in any implied harmony, that this anthology makes its considerable mark.

There are the ‘big names’ expected by anyone acquainted with contemporary spoken word – Omar Musa, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Miles Merrill, Luka Lesson, Selina Tusitala Marsh – brushing up alongside emerging artists like Melanie Mununggurr-Williams, Jesse Oliver and Eleanor Malbon. Solid Air also takes a boldly expansive definition of ‘spoken word’, too, refusing the binary of ‘stage’ and ‘page’, including a great number of writers whose work confounds that outdated distinction – Nathan Curnow, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Quinn Eades, Omar Sakr and many more.

The selected authors are arranged alphabetically by surname, which means that Solid Air opens, entirely appropriately, with Hani Abdile’s ‘The beautiful ocean’, a breathtaking poem which somehow manages to hold the trauma of seeking asylum by sea within a refrain of love and survival. Immediately, Solid Air seems to be suggesting that the best ‘Australian’ poetry punctures holes – sometimes gentle, sometimes angry – in the idea of Australia itself. Behrouz Boochani, still imprisoned by the Australian government in offshore detention and denied citizenship, also appears in these pages, with a poem of longing and displacement in the midst of beauty.

Also appearing early in the anthology is one of the most exciting emerging voices around, Evelyn Araluen, whose ‘Fern your own gully’ lands with a thrillingly unsettling punch. The poem’s satire deconstructs ‘the smell of eucalypt’, ‘gumnut coins’ and ‘pastel bush dreams’ with fierce intelligence and a subjectivity that is both defiant and strategically elusive:

Just hop in that pouch, unusual girl
hop in the swag                this whole home waits
in handpainted frames of silk native frocks
            wear them to your reading
            wear wattles from your ears
it’s all metaphor for            the beautiful thin white woman
whose body slides linenly through bush

Resistance to colonialism – not only on the political and personal level, but in the idea of what literature is and should be – is a major theme in this book. Anahera Gildea, Te Kahu Rolleston, Grace Taylor and others from Aotearoa New Zealand fluidly integrate indigenous languages without translation. The casual disruption of English by these linguistic interventions is synecdochical – the words themselves standing for the ongoing embodied perseverance of all Indigenous peoples.

These juxtapositions feel more like mischievous channel surfing than any kind of straightforward argument. Araluen is followed by Ken Arkind, with his poem ‘Godbox’. With its long lines arranged vertically on the page, the poem is a jarring chorus of found prayers, numerous voices pleading in confusion, whispered despair and shouts of anger towards a deity who ‘will not answer’. The experience of reading it is shocking, visceral, tenderising.

Another poem driven by a prayerful refrain is ‘Tramlines’ by Arielle Cottingham, which riffs on the racialised implications of hair straightening and ‘straight-ness’ itself in the context of family and public ideas of beauty. To write such a thematic summary, of course, reduces the poem – it’s much more exhilarating and untamed than that, merciless in its honesty and how it implicates the reader. Here, the voice is capitalised, italicised, enjambed and run-on, so that its rhythms and pressures (both internal and external) are made acutely tangible.

These poems are not simply transcriptions of what is spoken. There are experiments with the space of the page that make a hesitant, stuttering or self-correcting voice concrete, but there are also elements here that can’t be understood purely in terms of the heard voice, but include a kind of unheard, internal voice. Emily Crocker’s ‘Spooks’ enfolds complexity into caesura and strikethroughs: 

Glitching in the aisles,    mate              ah        ma’am
I knew I was a worryman when I began using my form
as a flotation device, 	            a skeleton key,               a dustpan –

On a similar note, while to my ears Amanda Stewart’s poetry really does need to be heard, her ‘postiche’ allows a reader to experience the scrapes, slippages and ambiguities of her voice in a rigorous and playful page translation. Reminiscent of experiments with typewriters, but also of sound-artist DJs, ‘postiche’ manages to evoke late capitalism, surveillance and anxiety, without explicitly naming any of them.

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Magan Magan Reviews S K Kelen’s Yonder Blue Wild and Kit Kelen’s Poor Man’s Coat

Posted on December 19, 2019 by Magan Magan

Yonder Blue Wild by S K Kelen
Flying Islands, 2017

Poor Man’s Coat by Kit Kelen
UWA Publishing, 2018





We came from the ice 
and out of the trees
and wanted the whole world warmer. (Kit Kelen, ‘Parable’)

Award-winning author S K Kelen beautifully explores the theme of travel in his collection Yonder Blue Wild. For some, travel is a benefit awarded to them by virtue of their class; for some it is a tool to attain an idealised version of the life they want to lead. For others, travel is something they have no choice in. The connecting thread is indeed a kind of escapism, and an attempt to express, through movement from place to place, one’s own humanity. In that expression hides stories untold.

Kit Kelen’s collection Poor Man’s Coat complements the theme of his brother’s collection, as he looks at conversation and argument as expressions of personhood. The interesting parallels between the collections are their ability to pronounce these themes through mirror poems and window poems. Mirror poems function as poems that connect people with themselves by way of revealing the self to oneself – the key feature being revelation. Window poems are observational poems that provide the self with insight through observation.

The effect of reading the title, Yonder Blue Wild, contradicts the theme of the collection. Each noun, ‘yonder’, ‘blue’, ‘wild’ stands alone, only moving with when animated by the reader. They are like the state of a stagnant person suddenly moving after unexpected change, triggered by their lack of control. Change is an invisible signpost required to adapt in the world. We have no choice but to be alone in this world even though fighting it seems natural – drugs or alcohol or sex or the chaos of people. The theme of the collection is that travel is part of the human experience, but for me, a person whose stomach begins to turn at the thought of travel, reading this work automatically calls into question the idea of a collective existence. I find it difficult to ignore the idea of travel as an opportunity to temporarily glaze over being born into this world without choice.

What do we have if not our context? It’s a position from which our humanity can be found. In his poem, ‘Love In The Tropics’ S.K. Kelen gives context to his characters. It is precisely due to the contextualisation of their scenario that Frank and Kathy are understood in a complex fashion: 

and these
people on the trail, intent on experience...

Wait, Frank the American civil engineer
staying on the beach now six weeks tires
of his Australian girlfriend, Kathy, who 
speaks of literary life in Sydney
boring Frank in the chai shop making
eyes at Yvette vivacious French hippy
Kathy might be jealous, she might not be
& life goes on.

‘Love In The Tropics’ sheds light on a reality that is too often ignored and or is too painful to acknowledge. Kelen speaks to a kind of exhaustion that takes place when a person doesn’t confront the state of their relationship. Such exhaustion eventuates into dysfunction. This is indeed the beauty of poetry: its commitment to the reality of the lives of people and its strength to hold two otherwise opposing things in equality. What is the root of Frank’s exhaustion? Is it his relationship with Kathy? Is it his insistence at ‘making eyes’ at Yvette? Similarly, with Kathy: is she jealous? Should she be?

If poetry guides us to take life as it is, then what happens when change doesn’t occur by virtue of our stubbornness? Will poetry be lost? I must make mention of John Keats’ poem ‘On the Sonnet’: ‘If by dull rhymes our English must be chained’. He fears that if a change in form doesn’t occur, the beauty of poetry will be lost. He uses Andromeda, known for her beauty as well as getting chained up, as a simile for the ruins of poetry. Although Keats speaks about the consequence of adhering to the rules of a sonnet, he sticks to the rules. This draws a comparison to Kelen’s poem when he writes ‘& life goes on’, calling upon an objective truth about the world, a universal law, despite his contextualization of his characters’ conflict. Like Frank, many of us continue on our path: 

Frank makes a joke ordering
banana cakes from the boy
Yvette smiles but Kathy 
Shrugs it off as part of travelling, 
Find a man on the beach.

Like Frank, we suffer through life in tiny ways as our pain nibbles at us. In S K Kelen’s poem ‘Tiger Show’, however, we see a different perspective on the notion of evolution. He stops his characters to ask: ‘What are you doing here, middle aged Australian / couple?’ A question as universal as love, a question that forces us to a stop: ‘Left the kids at home, let loose / seeing Bangkok’s dizzy lights / before it’s too late’. The difference here is evolution triggered by outside forces, of evolution starting to manifest outwardly.

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Elena Gomez on as Reviews Editor

Posted on December 13, 2019 by Kent MacCarter

I’m honoured to announce that Elena Gomez will be taking up the helm of Reviews Editor. Gomez is a poet and editor who worked in book publishing for ten years. She is the author of a number of chapbooks and the full-length collection Body of Work (Cordite Books), which was Highly Commended in the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Her poetry, essays, interviews and reviews have been published widely, and she regularly appears at literary festivals. She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design.

This also means that Bonny Cassidy will be leaving the post after 5 years, though will remain on our advisory board. Her contribution to Cordite Poetry Review is incalculable, and there is not a deep enough thanks I can extend to her on making our long form poetry reviews peerless in Australia, and ushering in our Indigenous engagement policies. She will be back with an introduction to our forthcoming 40 Poets in late 2020.

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BAYT Editorial

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zeina Hashem Beck

Dear reader,

In Arabic, ‘bayt’ means house and also a line of poetry. Welcome. I hope you enter and explore. The poems in this issue are universes, every one of them an ode of sorts: to food, to music, to home(s), to language(s), to (be)longing, to cars, to the body, to dogs, to neighbors, to family, to friends, to god, to cities, to the self, to grief, to love. There’s so much love in these poems; I felt held re-reading them this morning.

Dear reader, I was a little girl in Tripoli, Lebanon, and I wanted to become a poet. I wanted to become a poet because I wanted to inhabit the language of poetry – how it moved me, how there was something magical about it. Then I became a literature student in Beirut who still wanted to become a poet, though I had no idea how to write or publish, and more importantly, I had no idea how to find a community of poets in which I felt supported. I read Hugo and Baudelaire in French, I read Darwish and As-Sayyab in Arabic, I read Eliot and Szymborska in English and English translation. I read poetry at some open mic nights in Beirut, and I read on balconies or the floor of the university with friends. But when I looked for poets of Arab heritage who wrote in English now, I was only able to find Naomi Shihab Nye (she has a poem in here, and this is one of the beautiful ways the universe sometimes works). So much has changed since, and I’m happy to see the Anglophone community of Arab-heritage poets grow, this issue being but a sample of the varied voices that would have made a younger me feel seen, that makes the present me (and us, I hope) feel more held, that makes the ultimate home that poetry is vaster, stronger.

Dear reader, I have two confessions. The first is that when I was asked to guest edit this issue, I felt … exhausted. Perhaps because writers of Arab heritage are often put in the same category, are often expected to perform their Arab-ness, so I asked myself whether curating this issue meant feeding into this. I soon moved from this initial feeling of doubt to one of excitement: excitement about creating a space, a house, a bayt, made up of the work of poets I looked for decades ago, excitement about celebrating this multiplicity of voices and their infinite possibilities. The second confession is that I’ve been away from poetry lately. A beautiful revolution has been unfolding in Lebanon since 17 October 2019, and I’ve been incapable of doing anything but watch it and think about it. Revolutions in Iraq, Chile, Iran, also this month. And Gaza, bombed again. For more than 40 days now, as I looked at the news and social media, as I received constant WhatsApp messages and videos from friends and family in Lebanon and outside of it, as I kept looking at plane tickets to consider going to Beirut for the weekend, I asked myself, what use is poetry, really? Yet even as I asked myself this, even when I couldn’t get myself to read one line of verse, I knew that poetry was a home, I knew I would always return to it (even if only briefly for now), as I did this morning, re-reading these poems. For beauty, for laughter, for grief, for questioning, for prayer, for love. For the power of words. Poetry can’t change the world, and yet it does, doesn’t it?

Dear reader, welcome.

Dear fellow poets, thank you for your important work. Thank you for your companionship. Thank you for building this small bayt, this house, this line in an ever-growing poem.

29 November 2019

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Dear White, It’s OK to be white

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Ghassan Hage

In October 2018, the motion ‘It’s OK to be white’ introduced in the Australian Parliament by White Supremacist Senator Pauline Hanson. The motion called for the ok-ness of Whiteness while denouncing ‘anti-white racism’ and ‘attacks on Western civilization.’ Astonishingly, it was only narrowly defeated 31-28, with many members of the ruling conservative Liberal-National Party coalition supporting it. This short text was written in response to this vote.

In the text, I use white to mean a white-skinned person (which as many academic works have shown is a far less straight-forward description than it might first appear). On the other hand, I use White with a capital W to indicate a White who has a conscious or unconscious investment in a Whiteness that they think they possess. It is someone who mistakes, in a classically racist way, an identification with their skin colour, as they imagine it, for an identification with Western Civilisation, and, someone who derives as a result of their identification with White skin colour, as they imagine it, a national and colonial sense of supremacy, that is, someone who thinks that their skin colour, as they imagine it, entitles them to certain privileges over and above what other beings are entitled to. (For a more in depth discussion of this complicated process of identification see my book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society).

~

Dear white, it’s ok,
It’s ok to be white.

but it’s ok to be white and nice.
It’s not ok to be White and mean.

It’s ok to be white and generous in spirit.
It’s not ok to be White, envious and stingy.

It’s ok to be white and ill-informed, and try to know more. 
It’s not ok to be White, ill-informed, ignorant and mediocre, and be proud of it.

It’s even ok to be white and prejudiced, as long as you’re trying to work on yourself to be less prejudiced.
It’s not ok to be White and prejudiced and ignore and justify your bigotry.

It’s ok to be white and demand and struggle for a better life because you deserve more as a human being.
It’s not ok to be White and demand a better life because you think you deserve more because you are White.

It’s also ok to be a socially unrecognised and low-achieving white and still be proud of the many wonderful cultural and scientific successes, attainments and accomplishments that white people have achieved across history, but it’s not ok to think that just because you share the same skin colour with those high achievers that their achievements have something to do with skin colour and are yours only. Most of these great white achievers wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole, so stop acting as if you represent them.

It’s ok to be white and be the descendant of people who have plundered, exterminated, enslaved and subjugated other peoples and their lands across this planet, if you recognise it and deal with its consequences. It’s not ok to be a White who is aspiring to perpetuate what your ancestors have done in this regard.

If you don’t recognise any of this no amount of official and non-official declarations and proclamations will change the fact that you are a shitty White, a racist scum, and a scourge on all of us, white and non-white, who are struggling to make this already damaged planet as bearable to live in as possible.

On the other hand, you would be so great if you can recognise all this. 
So 
why settle with being ok when you can be great?

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In Search of Living Rooms Filled With Laughter: On Belonging as a British-Lebanese in a Time of Revolution

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Nasri Atallah

I had my first panic attack somewhere on the Central Line between Marble Arch and Bond Street. Sitting in an empty, well-lit carriage the world darkened and tightened around me. I thought I might disappear. I stood by the doors, willing them to open. Even in the darkness, I’d run through the rest of the tunnel, then push past people on the escalator, smashing through the exit gates. I’d surface and find what was left of myself. But the doors didn’t open, so I had to close my eyes and pinch at the sides of my jeans to check I was still here. When the doors aligned with the platform, I dug my fingers into the space between them, helping them release me, finding my way to the rain.

That was almost four years ago. Everything I had consumed about Trump becoming president, about ‘shithole’ countries and travel bans, about Brexit and Nigel Farage, was now consuming me. I had just left Lebanon because I couldn’t see myself staying there and here I was in the city that birthed me unable to feel welcome either.

Now, the panic has been dulled. Now, I catch myself in a numbness. Unable to feel something I know I am supposed to feel. Suddenly feeling it all at once. I feel scraps of emotion. I perform emotion. But I am mostly just tired. I am British, Lebanese and British-Lebanese. In a transactional late capitalist world where we must all be meta-tagged to within an inch of our lives, I have chosen British-Lebanese as an identifier. It means nothing. I suppose it means slightly more than each of those things alone. But I am also often neither Lebanese nor British. I am often an imposter. Moving through the world while I lie to everyone about who and what I am.

I used to think I was part of a hybrid identity. That somehow, in the hyphen between places I wasn’t from, I had found a community. I read up breathlessly about Third Culture Kids. A community bound by what we don’t have rather than what we do have. Third Culture Kids. I have come to hate that term, something many people like me latched onto. But all it meant was that we had lived interesting childhoods surrounded by many cultures and that our parents were probably middle-class professionals somewhere interesting. Hardly something to cry about. Hardly an oppressed minority. Just misunderstood and unmoored sometimes. But who isn’t. The label stares back at me now, infantilising and backward-looking. A community that might have been.

I have constructed identity in opposition to what I have not been. Growing up in London, I built a form of fantasy Lebanese-ness. I stuck images of the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek and the Jeita Grotto to my bedroom walls with the Blu-tack left over from school projects. I surrounded myself with images of a country I had never set foot in. I built it in my mind from pieces of discarded memories my parents left lying around the house. A faded photograph of unmet relatives, a cassette of a Ziad Rahbani play I would listen to, understanding every 10th word. One of my earliest memories at home is of a full living room full of semi-strangers. My parents often had friends over when I was young. All the women had fiery red lipstick and smelled of freshly applied Elnett hairspray. The men wore dark suits and crooked ties. Everyone, except my parents, smoked. Tumblers of Johnny Walker Black Label made little rings of water on the coffee table and pistachios sat in little bowls. Everyone spoke in accented Arabic. I knew they weren’t all Lebanese but I didn’t know what that meant. I was only meant to come in to say hi to all the uncles and aunts, none of whom were my uncles or aunts. But I would listen to their laughter from my bedroom and think this is how us Arabs laugh. Fully, uncontrollably, as if possessed.

As I write this, there isn’t much laughter. The Lebanese October 17 Revolution is well into its second month. I sit on the sofa fiddling around with the YouTube app to find a live stream of a Lebanese news channel, I feel empty and disconnected from everything. Both the physical space I inhabit now in London and the space I left behind in Lebanon. In the early euphoria of the revolution, I wanted to fly out to participate. I selected my tickets, and hovered over the keyboard, credit card in hand. The ritual dance of the online transaction about to be consummated. But I couldn’t do it. It felt like conflict tourism. Heading back to a place that I had left behind to somehow usurp their revolution. It was my revolution too, of course, just not now. For a decade in Lebanon, all I wished for was for it to be a better place. Not even better, just normal. I recently read about the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s visit to Hungary in the late 1970s, where he met of the communist regime. ‘We are not dissidents,’ they said.’ We represent normality.’ Normality is all anyone wants.

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The Arabic Poem that Jumped the Fence

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Huda Fakhreddine

In 1960, the Syrian Lebanese poet Adonis published his prose poem manifesto and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj published his collection Lan (Won’t) with its seminal introduction theorising for the possibilities of poetry in prose. These are two theoretical cornerstones that launched the prose poem in Arabic. They are the first instances of using the Arabic term qaṣīdat al-nathr (prose poem) and by that announcing the entrance of the phrase into Arabic as a ‘simple abstraction.’1 As such, Adonis and al-Hajj proclaimed the conceptualisation of a category even if the practice of blurring verse and prose had existed in Arabic literature for centuries before that. Thus, the Arabic prose poem was not invented in 1960 but rather became a thing with a name; it was pointed out as a problem or a cause. Writings that could be described as poetry in prose or prose with poetic qualities go back as far back as the pre-Islamic prose, the Qur’ān, and Sufi writings. However, once the phrase qaṣīdat al-nathr as a simple abstraction was introduced, this rich pre-history was called into being as a history, and the prose poem became a critical lens or an enclosed class of poetic product. Its major claim was that it was poetry and its units were poems entirely freed from the restrains of meter and of pre-conceived form.

But poetry cannot be freed up. It is nothing at all if not tension or orchestrating tension that doesn’t tolerate hanging loosely. Once the Arabic prose poem jumped the fence of meter, it exposed itself to pressing and fundamental questions about the very game of poetry, its possibilities, and the new parameters of the playing field. Despite its claims of freedom, individuality, subversive-ness, and democracy, the motor force of the Arabic prose poem has thus far been its quest for that organising tension that makes the poem; that deliberateness that guides the wandering and the going astray; that design that sharpens the edges of sentences into music and sculpts nothingness into a clearing.

‘One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,’ Wallace Stevens writes in his The Necessary Angel.2 Poets do not define poetry as much as discover it over and over. Poems are not definitions of poetry as much as they are disclosures of poetry, unveilings of its perpetually hidden and elusive faces. And, the prose poem is the most recent disclosure of Arabic poetry. Although it has now existed in Arabic as a term and a distinct poetic ‘genre’ since the early 1960s, it remains a novelty that is somewhat out of place. The distance between the Arabic prose poem and the Arabic poetic tradition is to a large extent what has kept it alive and controversial, and what has bestowed upon it a profound critical power by which it has placed every other established Arabic poetic form in question.

Even in their attempts at forging a link between their project and the Arabic literary tradition, Arab prose poets have continually insisted on the new-ness of ‘qaṣīdat al-nathr’ and its disruptive agenda. For it does not only pose the question, ‘What is poetry?’ but also, more subversively, urges us to ask: ‘What can be poetry in Arabic?’ In a tradition that has long accepted very clear-cut distinctions between poetry and prose, such a prospect is both exciting and unsettling. 3

By proposing to redefine the very notion of Arabic poetry and to open it up, the prose poem becomes a space where poetic and extra-poetic imperatives intersect. Furthermore, the prose poem places the relationship with the (non-Arab) other, the connection to the poetic past, and attitudes towards the Arabic language in question.

The term ‘Arabic free verse’ (al-shiʿr al-ḥurr) is often used as a synonym for the Arabic modernist movement of the Twentieth Century, referring to a project that was launched in the late 1940s and is still on-going today. However, the poets and poems included under this heading do not constitute a homogenous group. Aside from the grand gesture of breaking away from the classical ode, the qaṣīda (the metrical and mono-rhyme master-Arabic poetic structure which dominated Arabic poetry from pre-Islamic times until the first half of the Twentieth Century), the proliferations of the Arabic modernist movement were primarily motivated by distinguishing themselves from each other. Hence, it might be more accurate to study the various disclosures of modern Arabic poetry as responding to each other and growing out of each other, than it is merely to view them in contrast with classical Arabic qaṣīda or measure them up against outside influences.

A distinct notion of the ‘modern’ Arabic poem begins to emerge when one considers the variances and inter-connections between the modernist trends and movements of the Twentieth Century.4 This approach serves to upset the illusion of a monolithic ‘Arabic modernism’ by breaking it down into modernist positions with multiple visions and proposals for what the modern Arabic poem can be. This approach also puts in perspective the two often exaggerated stimuli of this experiment: the Arabic literary tradition and the western poetic influence.

There is no doubt that the Arabic qaṣīda remains present in the background as point of reference for much of the innovations of the modernist project, especially on a formal and structural level. Nevertheless, as the modernist experimentations developed and moved beyond the early ‘pioneer’ years of the late 1940 and early 1950s, the poets and theorisers were more concerned with commenting on and responding to each other’s work. The same applies to the role the western poetic influences. I would go as far as to say that, beyond the early phases, western models introduced through translation of poetry and theory into Arabic, were relatively marginal participants in developing the poetics of the modern Arabic poem. The main agent in the elucidation of a new poetics was the on-going and self-absorbed revisions, refinements, and modifications of modern poem, in which the various trends and movements were engaged. And, although one can point to several positions and directions within this large experiment, each presenting an agenda and imagined trajectory for the modern poetry, the two most visible manifestations of the modern poem in Arabic are: the free verse poem (qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla ) which remains within the parameters of meter even if expanded and loosened and the prose poem (qaṣīdat al-nathr), the rogue form which defies all pre-existing prescriptions.5 Many qualities of each are elucidated by the on-going dialogue between the two forms.

The Arabic prose poem, qaṣīdat al-nathr, which later became the rallying point for the Shiʿr group and their journal founded in 1957, is primarily a response to qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla and the relatively fixed definition of poetry endorsed by the 1949 modernist pioneers (especially the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika)6. The Arabic prose poem made its biggest statement by claiming to be poetry without any metrical consideration whatsoever. It is more comparable to the French and English free verse than it is to the prose poem in these languages. Prose poets in Arabic often write lineated, lyrical, short or long pieces which are similar in mood, tone, and themes to what was written under the aegis of qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla. It is the absence of meter coupled with the claim of being poetry that made these writings scandalous. It is, thus, necessary to study the Arabic prose poem in its conversation with qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla.

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Reel Bad Lebs

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

For Edward and Jack, unreal Arabs

Up until I was nine years old, my favourite film was Blood Sport. Frank Dux, who was played by Van Damme in the prime of his career, competed against the world’s best fighters in the underground martial arts tournament called the Kumite. Early in the film, a brown-skinned man in a traditional Saudi headdress named Hossein tries to force the white female lead, Janice, upstairs to his hotel room for an ‘interview’. When she refuses, Hossein raises his open hand to slap her. Fortunately, Frank Dux intervenes, grabbing Hossein’s arm and winning a bet against him, which spares the blonde-haired damsel from imminent physical and sexual assault. As a result, Frank gets the girl the consensual way – they take a friendly walk, making fun of Hossein as they meander, they have a romantic dinner and then they head back to Frank’s hotel room for a wholesome night of procreation.

On the first day of the Kumite, which I re-enacted repeatedly in my bedroom, Frank Dux’s preliminary bout is against Hossein, who says in a thick and coarse Arab accent, ‘Now I show you some trick or two.’ As soon as the bell rings, Frank takes Hossein down with a few quick punches, breaking the world-record for the fastest Kumite knock-out in history. But shifty Hossein does not concede defeat, and after Frank is declared victorious, he stands and attempts to take a cheap shot at him from behind. Frank pre-empts the attack, and delivers a reverse elbow and punch combination which knocks Hossein out cold.

Whenever I had a punch-up during primary school, within the white-dominated working-class slums of Newtown, I always tried to imagine myself as Frank Dux. I would throw three straight punches, one roundhouse kick, and one helicopter fly-kick, concussing my opponent in a few seconds. One lunchtime, this older eleven-year-old boy named Matthew Pearce, who had piercing blue eyes, called me a ‘Lebanese shit’. As the other kids in his grade watched on, I threw a succession of punches and kicks, each of which missed him by a foot. Matthew stood back and watched me tire myself out, and then he stepped in toward me, gave me one hard push, and I was down. Lying on the ground while Matthew and the other kids laughed at me and chanted ‘Lebanese shit’, I finally realised: I wasn’t Frank Dux. I was Hossein.

In 1978, Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said released his controversial book Orientalism, which investigated the Western depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African people, places and cultures throughout history. Overwhelmingly, Said discovered deliberate representations which propagated myths about the East’s mysticism, exoticism, primitiveness, barbarism and violence. These depictions sought to create preconceived notions about the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Oriental’ in order to serve Western interests in the East: ‘Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it, by making statements about it, authorising views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it’ (Said 2003, p.3). Orientalism was primarily a British and French activity up until the Second World War, followed by the ‘latest phase’ of the phenomenon as Arab lands and resources became a central target of American imperialism:

Since World War II, and more noticeably after each of the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become a figure in American popular culture, even as in the academic world, in the policy planner’s world, and in the world of business, very serious attention is paid the Arab… If the Arab occupies space enough for attention, it is a negative value. He is seen as the disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence, or in another view of the same thing, as a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948 (2003, pp.285-286).

Whilst I had never heard the term ‘orientalism’ until my post-graduate years at university, I have been the victim of orientalism from as early as I can remember – every time I watched a Hollywood movie I doubled-down on the belief that people who looked like me and had names like mine are bad, real bad.

In 2009, a comprehensive film investigation by Arab-American scholar, Jack G Shaheen confirmed my suspicions. The title of his book, Reel Bad Arabs, is a play on the word ‘real’ – real Arabs that can be found in the real world in contrast to fictional Arabs that can be found on the film reels of the world’s dominant moviemaking industry.

Pause and visualize the reel Arab. What do you see? Black beard, headdress, dark glasses. In the background – a limousine, harem maidens, oil wells, camels. Or perhaps he is brandishing an automatic weapon, crazy hate in his eyes and Allah on his lips. Can you see him? Think about it: when was the last time you saw a movie depicting an Arab or American of Arab heritage as a regular guy? (Shaheen 2009, p.8).

Reel Bad Arabs lists in alphabetical order over 900 American films since the establishment of Hollywood that negatively portray Arab people, especially Arab-Muslim people. This list includes films where the presence of Arab characters is central to the plot, such as in the 1970 epic Lawrence of Arabia, and films where Arabs are simply background villains for stories that do not concern Arabs at all, such as the 1985 science fiction classic Back to the Future, where a murder scene involves Arab caricatures armed with assault rifles and speaking a gibberish language which is supposed to be Arabic (Shaheen 2009, pp.91-92). Shaheen’s study extends over many decades and genres, from historical films such as adaptations of Cleopatra (1912, 1917, 1934, 1963) to thriller and action films such as adaptations of The Mummy (1932, 1959, 1999). He examines adventure films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and action blockbusters such as True Lies (1994) and even animated features such as Disney’s Aladdin (1992). While some theorists have considered symbolic and figurative portrayals of Arabs in Hollywood films, for example of the savage aliens in Star Wars (1977) called ‘The Sand People’, Reel Bad Arabs focuses on portrayals where the characters and the places are only ever intended as ‘literal’ depictions of Arabs and the Arab world.

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10 Works by Justine Youssef

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Justine Youssef


Duha Ali, Justine Youssef
Kohl | 2018 | 3 channel video installation, 4 minutes and brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay vessels, dimensions variable, video still

‘Kohl’ was created in collaboration with artist Duha Ali. In the work we trace our ancestral practice of making kohl by hand for two consecutive days at a sandstone quarry in Kurrajong, north-west of Darug land. It is a site of ecological devastation, bearing witness to the genesis of Sydney’s colonial sandstone structures and continuously being eroded by human force.

‘Kohl’ contemplates the practice of settler-migrant rituals on stolen land. Traditionally in our villages, kohl is used in a number of ways — applied after prayer, to protect the eyes from the sun, to ward away the ‘evil eye’ and for its healing properties. Through an engagement with site and material, this work creates a conversation around the way in which cultural inheritances exist within, in this case, Darug and Darebin land.

This work was informed by the generosity of the Darebin Aboriginal Land Council who advised us as we developed the work.

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bil 3arabi: 6 poems by Sara Saleh

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Sara M Saleh

Dedication

She asks me why I don’t write in Arabic.

“You’re Arab, no?”

“Eh, mbala … but …” I try, more question than statement.
“I am … but …” Always a disclaimer.

What I want to say,
“What does it mean to exist in in-betweens? Shame, self-doubt, siesta?”

So shukran, Zeina, for awakening the languages inside me. I am learning.
And like most things in hijra, this is ongoing.

These stories are living,
and no one can occupy that.

To rebuilding languages, and rebuilding the cities inside us.

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Ode to My Husband, Who Brings The Music

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zeina Hashem Beck

There are more windows in the new house, so much light
the living room feels weightless. On weekends, I find you
staring out into the garden from the sofa.
You always wake before me, go downstairs & start
playing a song on your phone—sometimes it’s new,
more often it’s not, & always it works
the memory. When we carved the olive tree near our school,
we could barely see the letters. But after the rain,
they blazed orange. Does bark heal, our names
buried inside it? A name is a wound is a song,
so what you’re really doing is calling me. From what
sleep? You warned I eat my days too fast,
or perhaps it was too slow. You once asked,
What happened? A balding head, a bank account.
Somewhere, a boy with a black fringe kicks a football & eats figs
straight from the tree. I repeat the story of my fear
of fig trees, how my parents said the wind from the branches
could blind me. No such thing, you shrug.
Half of our hometowns thought our marriage was a sin.
A mistake, at least. There were phone calls.
There was hanging up. Years of silence.
& though we weren’t a revolution,
we were at least a questioning.
Last week, you almost dialed my old phone number,
& I wondered whether it would ring
in my childhood house, & whether I’d rush to answer.
Only you know & remember the house I drew
over & over again in all my school books:
house with roof tiles, with chimney,
with lake & swan. Simple, geometric house
I never colored in. But look how resilient
the future is, how I underestimated
the importance of big windows. Of the calm sea
of you. I don’t know at what age we learn to be afraid
of happiness. Our first slow dance was in a family club
called Union, in a town too small. We had no flow,
still have none. Unless you consider this—

me in bed, not ready for the morning yet,
& you downstairs, bringing the music.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

god moves at the speed of my name

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Noor Ibn Najam

in vacuum know words to praise god
cant explain love letters 2
god of no one else god mother
i tongue i light fallen far from
patriarch and fist just wait til
i learn my language my logic
sans rules men rules men writing their
godbooks lying by omission
nur nour noor and nowhere my name

shops on 52nd street
men who see me give me sweet
oils incense tafaddalu
me as offering all belly
dance skirts mine! they rehip me,
they hear me! hear me and the
women stop pretending they
dont see me fear me unknow
me love me. ukhti me my
eye on wrist a talisman

light is my bismillah
though i ameen elsewhere.
no english, no nigglish
nonpronouned but i speak
not cantonese. kill my
tongue a spectacle, mine
the body gawked. stubborn,
i stare back. i know god
made me black. but god, how
do i find my black words

which unlit language
still meandering
streetlights signals which
home? was i born in?
overwhelmed my mind
with these new neural
pathways, lit up like
some false third eye glow.
im all babel god
how am i still lost

all wor_ds allah
rules over by
habit: god is
a virgo and
eternally
will nitpick at
the apocalypse.
hence im stuck here
with these muslim
aunties 3ammos

lonely trek
within me
allah is
the long walk
the unlit
path if i
only could
find god i
might could speak
guiltlessly

allah
you see?
where i
omit
pronouns?
whose are
missing?
and what
does that
tell you?

god
is
mine.
get
your
own.
god
is
noun
. or

?

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

For the Bagged Body in Front of Koshary Ameen Restaurant

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Nadra Mabrouk

Sometimes, I think about your hair, how it must have smelled of the space in bones where and when we curve inward, layered in casein, dry oats, incoherences. How yesterday, you picked up a slab of sheep meat, a couple of rib bones for dinner tonight, tomatoes. How yesterday, you might have forgotten to soothe yourself in forgiveness and the temporary bleached wave of gratitude, its constant bell. There is a stubbornness to grief. Its crooked stem continues to hang at an angle from the clay. My father and I stood on the corner of Emad Eldeen street, stared at how you were wrapped in your bag for hours because you didn’t have any ID on you, how a name must still be somewhere, starting to cloud in someone’s mouth. My father was pressing on to my hand, as though the smaller the space between our fingers, the more certain we would become of our own bodies: the bitter promise of calcified bones, brief blades the dusky color of iron, derma folding into its stretch, everything beneath fluttering, contained.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

fairouz is searching for a pair of eyes

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zein Sa'dedin

the colour of a country
& in the national gallery of art i find
hers staring at me from within the body

of a new woman a spectacle of light
caught mid conversation

in the limelight nearby i tell her
we are not entitled to know the body yet
it will escape us like it always does
one foot in front of the other

.أ

to figure a border i’ve been told
you must first start with the body

in the fresco of a bathing woman
you can see the effect of its creator’s
breath left on the plaster at the edge
of the painting where the edge
is purposeful

unlike baladi in the 20th century
‘created almost by accident’

we know how a single sneeze from the right
white nose can cut open a new country

water spills out of the woman’s face
like a harvest                    

each pigment wept
into position then i move on

.أأ

they say we owe it to god’s
country to mark our distance from
its beginning its unprimed canvas its one
rosary eye

so while in the westness i try
to find her a country of our own
making but each museum is a mirror in
mourning each sky a stolen artifact

homeland-less again
i return to our cities
and on those same

balconies nearby women
ululate          their welcome        
through the air                  like a bird
glistening against                
the limestone        

.أأأ

on my way back from the future          i discover for fairouz an almost-country
a mountain of turquoise                                
cloud hiding in the desert                                

what she wished for        
that one wellspring        
of a song called ‘wattani’

she asks me to bring it home        
mid-air it dissolves                
its architecture                        

.أأأأ

akh! ya albi        it’s almost as if        
this new mesopotamia doesn’t want to be found

hiding somewhere
in a madaba-like mosaic
bare in the basement of
an unknown church

still        fairouz chases the silhouette
of its dream on the behalf
of storms everywhere

.أأأأأ
DEAR MR. GALLERY MAN,
I am lost and have been lost for centuries.
The instructions are missing and I am tired.
I would like to stop looking by myself for a while.

.أأأأأأ

fairouz is searching for a
country the colour
of a pair of eyes
with a harvest like
the dawning of a face
so i draw on her eye
brows with a felt pen
i stretch her skin with
total intent i hope to put
all sneezes wa their endless
consequences behind me
since it is written that
to body the edge of
a border first you must
open its figure first
you start with its eyes

.أأأأأ

في معهد فن الفسيفساء والترميم
i ask my instructor how easy it is to forget origin
how difficult it is to restore a whole of fragments
to re-build a body post-partition                
she says                  whatever you do
mosaics are pixelated                
you can’t ask a tessera to be other
than what it is          يا زين        
it would do you well to remember
not every mosaic can be protected
from time wa its burglars

.أأأأ

in my dream i’m on aunti zein’s
porch painting a blue peninsula into
the sky named fairouz in the near distance
the dead sea makes her first appearance four
hundred wa twenty three new metres above
place sixty point eight kilometres too close
for comfort each pillar the old sea brings
with it sits tight in the garden right below
our family’s oldest possession a country
of light drawn fresh wa free-hand

.أأأ

but these women
welcoming us
to a home mismade
how they body
the air in the dents
of their frame
how among
our elders an argeeleh
pipe travels
how the cards
are lost slowly
sheikh by sheikh

.أأ

multiple modes of sensation cannot exist without suffering. the old masters. how well they
understood. of acclimation too the flesh can make itself a master. if the sky changes tone the brush tips
must charge onwards. our hands must negotiate the unanticipated one gradual mixture at a time. to
create you must accept the human position. accept the gradience you cannot change with a flexible
wrist. hold your palette close to the heart of your eyes. do not forget the canvas begins as a desert.
neither of which are blank. the brush an extension of lightning ready to make its mark. approach
both gently. trust in their ability to strike in the sand a sign you did not know you need.

.أ

when you asked me what mahmoud meant when he said
“لربما القمر ليس جميلاً
إلا لأنه بعيد”
wa i told you ‘maybe the moon is not beautiful                
except        that it is far away’        
you said translation fit my mouth perfectly
since then i’ve asked the moon to come closer every
night wa every night the moon pretends not to hear me
she turns her face away from me until all i can see is the pure
curvature of her neck        stretched like a minaret light        
in the horizon        the rest of her body
a faint border in the dark يا قمر
عيوني إليك ترحل كل يوم         
        وإنني أصلي
                                

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

How did the gods make skin waterproof, asks my lover

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Hind Shoufani

London, August 30th, 2019

Her beauty blotted out the screech of metal on wheels, trains in the anxious
depths, big city loudness. Tattoos— on joints, a cryptic symbol
or ten. On calf, a dragon exhaling.
Clavicle: the spread wings of heart.
Stomach: a spider web. Bicep: lions roaring. Thigh: leaves rustling.
She sat across from me, staring at her phone.
I counted the decisions in her skin.

What would you tattoo on your wrist if your life depended on it?
How would you speak of terror, using ink on your bones?

Exposed skin, big city freedom, dirt on every pulsating surface.
From planes to rough fabric seats of the masses,
to the sticky hand prints on mottled chrome.
Skin, with illustrations, almost a comic book of all she feared,
a drawing pad for the love she held on to.
I had nothing to read on the train, and a beautiful woman lent me her body.

What events did I casually imprint on mine?
When kissed, did the vocabulary of Damascus evenings cascade out into the lungs?
When groped, penetrated, smacked, shoved, aroused, bitten,
biting, clawing, holding, held—
did the lines assemble into a poem that stayed with the lover?
What have I uttered naked to the man who also loved Palestine?

Did my knuckles bring back a plot of stolen land? Perhaps
a willow tree swaying, the hum of his grandmother, smoking.
The panting dog, barking at the clouds.

We keep the cells of all those we loved in us.
Write, write onto your sinew the ballad you have been keening,
bring with it the dragons you wished lived
in your breasts. In your mother’s breasts.
Write on creases into which we shove truth.

The girl left the train as quickly as I noticed her.
Took no time then all of it at once. Slanted sharp blue eyes,
wispy brown long hair, the waist of a woman on the run,
in this city where no one sees us.
I see you, dragon woman with lace and limb, black and blue.
Not cold, not nervous, not worried about the drawings on your frame
or the wrapped up woman reading them.

Everything I have been taught about the trueness of love, I learnt only
in big cities. New York first, then the memory of parks in Damascus,
then the summer jostle of London flesh.

The commuting, ambling bodies of multitudes, elbowing through the stale air.
The shape of it all— fat and hair and nail polish.
Newspapers and burgers. Makeup mirrors, and the disgusted itching.
Stumbling ankles, pregnant bellies. The older woman with veined hands,
a huge diamond on the inner thigh of another. The leaning in,
the lips with gloss, recklessly giggling.
The boys with dirty hair, the girls with
none, pierced, bejeweled, entwined in drunken solace.
The small gestures of thumb and toe.
The black and the brown beauties, all frayed shoes and high
heeled madness, all crushed into a jigsaw of lust.
How tender, the tip of a finger on a forehead, sweating and scarred.
The man with his arm around the
wheelchair, the little girl gently kicking
the boy’s foot in rhythm, a dance of train stops and starts.

I have loved the sagging and the surging, the uplifted
hairdo and the invisible eyes behind shades,
the beards, the breasts, the booty.
Loved luscious skinny pale androgyny in the arms
of holographic lovers, all sucking on liquids and the damp heat.

I have learnt about love from big cities, big rides.
These bodies making more bodies from the harbored rocking,
from cramped beds to the salty sea waves.

What I knew of desire in those old cities where we hid, is now small, is wrong.
Here, in the grim capital of capital, bodies
have wrenched themselves from our gavels.
Flown across the aisle of the silver tube to fondle one another.

The skin of a stranger girl drawn into tapestry,
another way to remember my own, changing
into a rounder version of its youth.
How the body fails and snaps.

Listen to the announcement:

A fire on the tracks, another burnt body struck,
the dictionary of a jumping person buried.

The trains will move with childlike zest, oblivious
to the trembling in our stomachs, to the symbols on our hands.

Still, the world knows what to do with this love on display,
harnessing it as it does to the passing afternoons of this woman
traveling, with a dozen homes to return to.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Being-Nothingness

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Zaina Alsous

After Aphrodite Desiree Navab’s Super East-West Woman

The dervish in me can’t let go of my addiction
to theory. There are so many ways to explain
the tragedy of devotion; all the names of God
held captive by I. Come inside my blue cocoon,
lavish in a curiosity the state disputes. I didn’t say
I was really about that life. I said blue, not blew.
Heaven isn’t a happy ending, you know?
Heaven is crawling inside of a mirror and redraw-
ing with obsidian edges, to kill off crystal growth.
I never wanted to be a lava angel, or a good example.
When I say home, I mean origin as a transitive verb.
When I say love, I mean these miracles are work.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Spring Fragment

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Leila Chatti

I could see the branches, how they swept
back and back. The sky a narrow scrap
of color breaching gray cloudfront.
In the human landscape, dandelions
and debris, overgrown blades of sward.
I felt a little crushed, in the pleasant day, it was
as if I had no future. I could not love
my ordinary life. Not without an essential
obsession, a lesson.

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged

Understanding

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Chad Abushanab

We’ve come to it now
and sleep in rooms far apart
dreaming of others.


—for Hananah Zaheer

Posted in 94: BAYT | Tagged