Where All Down, Honey comes to us as a grounding, Jennifer Mackenzie’s The Wallace Line: A Poem takes its shape as a sounding. Its four sections can be loosely read through the intervals of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons; it was a collaborative rendition of the four-part concerto – between the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Egyptian-Australian oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros – that motivated Mackenzie to pen this collection, the third in a triad that navigates the poet’s imaginative home in Indonesia.
This is a densely musicological work that finds its pulse in such scenes as:
the gamelan’s ecstatic pinning of the minimal and the decorative to a percussive consciousness (‘Artaud and the Ecstatic Transfer’, 50)
where the “frantic hollow drumbeats score / a gestured metaphysic” (51).
Through these and many other of its “sharded flights of sound” (51), the work travels laterally as a rhizomatic songline in horizontal drift mode, harnessing the potential for enjambment to complicate our notions of delineation: of borders, of class, of taste, of east ‘versus’ west and of poetic speakers as arbiters of them.
Mackenzie’s voice foregrounds the kind of “non-self self” that poet Vahni Capildeo speaks about in relation to writing ‘after’ others, which she describes as an exercise in shaking off the authorial voice to “unsettle yourself from one text into another.” The various texts and secondary sources that The Wallace Line weaves are numerous and intricately honoured, from contemporary novels by writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Mathias Énard, to the canonical texts of Ezra Pound, W B Yeats, Joseph Conrad and those referencing Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud’s personal engagements with Bali and Java. Capildeo’s notion of unsettling also pertains to Mackenzie’s collection as a site of reckoning with the messy and co-constituted violences of colonial genocide and ecocide, trade monopolisation and modern appropriation, travelling from (and beyond)
palm oil plantations to the horizon
to the azure oceans of
PLASTIC
(‘Kalimantan’, 43)
Much like Gomez, Mackenzie gorges on the offerings of the extracted earth vis-à-vis her lively inventory of emotion and “brio of ornamentation” (‘Souk’, 15): Banda; bog; clove; cumin; dragons; gamelan; Jogja; kenari tree; mace; nutmeg; opium; slave quarters; Wallace Birdswing butterfly inter alia.
This brio (the term con brio referring to the instruction for musicians to play in a lively, energetic way) enables Mackenzie to conduct a polyphonous, counter-cartography; an embodied mapping of place. In doing so, she is adamant to tug on, as a means of unspooling, the very notion of a line – a desire reflected in the collection’s composition, which charts a loose horse-shoe arc, read as if a “circuitous route” or “gentle spiral in the trough” (‘Lee Mingwei: The Moving Garden’, 67). The book-length poem concludes in step with how it began: in the forests of Southeast Asia, among the ruins grown back over with spun cloth, now holding “the gift of the floral” (67). In between, it takes us to China, the Middle East, Australia and Europe, sliding with lyrical ease across sensorial and biopolitical borders on either side of the Sunda and Sahul Continental Shelves.
Our attention is drawn to the Wallace Line in particular: the biological, faunal boundary proposed in 1859 by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had documented the stark dissimilarity between land mammal species living on closely neighbouring islands within the Malay Archipelago. For Mackenzie, the Wallace Line acts as title, metaphor and symbolic antagonist, with the book’s front cover depicting the dashed line rendered in John Wolseley’s eponymous painting to which the work is in ekphrastic response. This dashing ontologically splits and coheres the collection around questions of migration and cultural friction as dynamic, non-linear processes. The book’s structure, too, follows a dashed logic: it is comprised of sets and subsets of poems which are intended to be read as a single one. This approach not only echoes Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s assertion that segmentivity is the central engine of poetry, but it reflects the contingent and shifting boundaries imposed overtop contiguous stretches of land and sea by colonial cartographers.
The Wallace Line marks both a faunal boundary and a topographic deep-sea reality, situated over a terrain some 250-metres deep into the Lombok Strait. At its narrowest, the strait is only 20 kilometres wide yet geological factors have meant that a land bridge never formed. It would be an oxymoron to say that the poem locks us into the transitional space of Wallacea, just as more recent scientific expeditions have confirmed that, although terrestrial and marine lifeforms have largely evolved their own unique DNA and ecosystems on either side of the strait, some animals such as pythons, fish and marine mammals regularly migrate across its turbulent channel. The entire book renders just such an unsettling of place: from the modern energy infrastructures in ‘Alien Coal / Corn’ with its “shrinking water table” observable along the ancient route of the Silk Road (24); to the transitional semiotics implied by the virgule (‘/’) responsible for sliding us from Banda to Venice (evoking the old Venetian-Levant trade route as it existed before the colonisation of Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company).
Mackenzie’s rich descriptive talents land us in a sensorium of observations that leap off the page, the page itself becoming an incarnation of the freighted non-human entities that constitute its very substrate in paper as tree, lignin, wood. This is place as “a thickly wooded panorama” (‘Banda I’, 3) “steeped in deep jungle” (‘Sailing’, 32); it is “a city / alive on the draftsman’s table” (‘Deserts Universal’, 26) or in the “theatre’s mango grove” (‘Artaud and the Ecstatic Transfer’, 50). It is the body as “sapling & bark / skin shedding all memory” wherein “the Achilles heel – / in the slime, a welcome in weed & bog” (‘Sailing’, 33). While charting many others’ journeys, it is Mackenzie’s own body that ultimately steers the lines of place from which she writes, producing a microclimate of emotion that blends time – “was it seconds or centuries later?” (‘Banda III’, 5) – and place “like ink upon the world” (‘Victory: An Island Tale’, 35).
This prefacing of a particular line – other lines have been proposed since Wallace’s – functions to trouble the assumptions we still hold around boundaries of demarcation. In a rather unassuming way, Mackenzie’s speaker – her non-self self – pokes at lines of gender and power through androgynous blurring of personas and shifting of verb tense, mobilising what Doris Lessing refers to as the “timeless, sexless and not culture bound” voice of the ancient storyteller in a manner that is reminiscent of independent voices woven across a musical fugue. This complexity is illustrated most acutely in section four: ‘The Wallace Line’, which consists of five cantos that read like expedition journals, in some cases acting as poetic retellings of first-person recollections taken directly from Alfred Russell Wallace’s 1869 travelogue, The Malay Archipelago.
Ferreting around in Art Monsters again, I find a compelling distinction arising from the Victorian era – the same period during which the Wallace Line was first dashed. Citing Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Elkin notes that women during this period were stereotyped as excelling at colour (emotional, sensual) over line (intellectual, rigorous). Mackenzie accomplishes an unsettling of the ‘self’ to the extent that both colour and line, emotion and intellect are equally present in the stanzas, refusing any such binary distinctions.
In ‘Maluku Prismatic’, for example, she writes:
the colour is luminous here memory is of pastel blue, pink, lemon robes in the marketplace dwellings a slash of yellow & mauve (6)
while elsewhere, in ‘New Energy’, she turns to the dictionary:
learn from the written word or no learning but from the experience of the imminent […] (23)
The collection embodies the slash and the transversal to complicate competing forces of pleasure and pain, joy and horror, historical fact and embodied observation. In Mackenzie’s grasp, clove becomes a substance that evokes lamentation, howling, “the presence of the anguished” (‘Banda I’, 3) and bloody massacres as much as it does
an alphabet from the fragment of a dream (‘Flying’, 8)
The ingrained schisms that are all too often glossed over in airbrushed narratives of exploration and ‘discovery’ become here an opportunity for reckoning with the realities of commodities in sensual relationship with any given (originary and/or borrowed/stolen/superimposed) environment. Rather than merely reinforcing the repeated and enduring violences – of trade, migration and the desecration of the sacred – the book’s sensorial and geographic terrain becomes the poetic matter of the very given world(s) we inhabit, the not-self self/speaker gently prodding us with a bamboo nutmeg picker to reveal the deep contours of paradox that reside there. In this way, it ushers us towards sightlines of solidarity that make the potential for planetary coexistence feel not only possible but luxurious (my mind again goes to Lorde, to her 1985 essay ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’).
The Wallace Line and All Down, Honey both strike me as embodying something of the ‘compositionist’ tendencies that Maureen N McLane (following Bruno Latour’s idea of ‘compositionalism’ as an alternative to ‘critique’) describes as broad assemblages of agencies across human and non-human life forms. While the realities of systemic destruction are never far from their pages, in both collections energy is funnelled into the kinds of imaginings and affects that can sustain our collective commons. Like honey, composed of nectar foraged from great distances under the threat of collapse, these collections gather the conditions of their production. In doing so they invite us to see ourselves in the legacies of the world’s undoing as much as in the potency of its enduring brio of sustenance. Mackenzie’s poem ‘Sailing’ opens with an epigraph in which Italo Calvino declares that: “I love [Joseph] Conrad because he navigates the abyss, and doesn’t sink into it” (32). All Down, Honey and The Wallace Line are a pleasure to read and reread for the same reason.
