Archive | September, 2010

SPUNC – Zoe Dattner

29 Sep

Alec Patric: A small press publisher called Russian Thought released a story called The Lady with a Little Dog in their December issue, in 1899. A little earlier, The Russian Messenger had released chapters of War and Peace in alternate issues with Crime and Punishment. The authors Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevski were not gracing the pages from the height of literary success and prestige. Those small press publishers were instrumental in bringing these works of literature into being. For me it’s always represented an ideal of small press publishing and perhaps a mythical era never to be seen again. If we contrast this to the embattled small press scene in Australia at the moment, we might feel a sense of tragic diminishment. But small presses are proliferating as small press publication becomes more broadly available. There are more passionate writers than ever in this country, and more Aussie publishers expressing a fierce dedication to grass roots work. The cultivation of an avid literary culture seems all that’s missing. What are your thoughts on this perspective and how can an organisation like SPUNC help in creating that kind of climate?

Zoe Dattner: I think that Australia does have a reasonably avid literary culture. If it didn’t we wouldn’t have such a proliferation of small presses, journals, university courses and independent bookstores – not to mention the number of individuals deeply passionate about writing and reading. Also, SPUNC wouldn’t exist. SPUNC came to be because a group of small publishers in Melbourne perceived an ever-growing small press sector that needed industry cohesion and representation. That is, the mass was approaching a critical one, which is fantastic news for emerging writers and adventurous readers, and the independent bookselling industry. As for the story you invoke about Chekhov, I’m pleased to say that this is something that continues to occur with those authors who are unearthed by small publishers. Helen Garner first emerged when a small publishing company called McPhee Gribble published Monkey Grip back in the 70s. Giramondo, a two person team in Sydney, continue to attract awards and nominations for a number of their books, as do many other publishers who are members of SPUNC. There are so many wonderful stories where authors who were rejected by every major publishing company are picked up by smaller ones, willing to take a risk, and having it pay off with critical acclaim, awards, or even better, high book sales. Most of these publishers you would never have heard of, and I hope that SPUNC is helping to attract more attention to these small outfits. In a lot of cases, these presses are operated part time, subsidised by other ‘day jobs’, and a lot of voluntary or unpaid work by people passionate about the titles, and keen to be a part of Australian publishing.

The mythical era you allude to is well and truly alive and vibrant right now. The future of publishing is abuzz with debate and as massive companies such as Amazon and Apple (and there are many others of course) enter the fray with predictions of how we will read, the issue of humans telling stories and conveying them to audiences has become a much bigger and globally shared conversation. Which is really very wonderful for us all. And small presses are able to take part in that conversation from ground zero. Because that is the only thing we have ever been that interested in. Many small publishers (including myself, probably) wouldn’t know a Da Vinci Code if it was hand delivered by golden angels descending from the sky with choral refrains of ‘This is going to be the biggest selling novel ever published’, but we know a Chekhov when we see one. No doubt about it. And we will publish it, and we will celebrate it, and we will feel chuffed. And the reader shall reap the rewards.

My father’s body in nine drawings (Francesca Rendle-Short)

23 Sep

1

My father is not yet dead. People who knew him say there is a likeness in this drawing. I can still see him breathing, can you? I still feel warmth when I bend to kiss his head in salutation; I feel a pulse through his skull against my lips. I imagine his gaze on me. Hello I hear him say, do I know you?

He doesn’t have long now to live. It is only a matter of hours. He dies the next day.

2

Maurice Blanchot once wrote: Look again at this splendid being from which beauty streams: he is, I see this, perfectly like himself. And someone says to me, kindly: Francesca, he’ll be tangle free you know, when he’s gone he’ll be at peace.

Death skewers the heart of those left behind, no matter what the age of those who are dying. One minute I have a father and he’s with me in the flesh. The next minute he’ll be gone, really gone, disappeared. All breathing stopped.

3

These images of my father’s body span two notebooks. You can see the ordinariness of the lines and checks on the paper I’ve drawn across. When I was called to his beside in Toowoomba, I didn’t think I would be drawing his figure as he lay dying: I thought he would be already dead. I didn’t think there would be enough room for me to spread out around his bed, not room enough to measure stillness like this. There are too many of us for that. We fill up his room, bodies everywhere. Nurses stay away.

4

Did you know, with six children in a family there are six children trying to say goodbye to six fathers? In mathematical terms, there are 720 different sorts of relationships the six of us can have – a multiplication of 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6. Add my father into the equation and multiply that figure by seven, to take it to 5040 combinations and permutations.

5

I draw fast, turning a page every few minutes. I don’t have long.

I draw him with a pencil found at the bottom of my bag.

Was it John Ruskin who said: but only draw what you see?

I watch my father find breath with my marks. The nurses tell me, when checking respiration, it is important to also note whether a person has any difficulty breathing.

6

Breath is involuntary. If you think about it too much your lungs hurt.

Did you know that on average we take 15 to 20 breaths per minute? That’s 900 to 1200 breaths per hour and 21600 to 28800 breaths per day. If we think of a year, we take 7884000 to 10512000 breaths in those 365 days – millions in other words. For my father who is 90 he has taken 709560000 to 946080000 breaths until now, to these, his very last.

7

My father is dying and I wonder what he is thinking, is he thinking at all. Does he still wish he will go to heaven to be with Angel, my mother? Is that his dream? Or has his Alzheimer’s clouded his view of any possible a f t e r l i f e?

I read once: in death, the rictus is an oddly painful unexpected ugly fact. The mouth is all wrong.

8

My father died when he was ninety. In mathematics, the number nine is at the end of the primary series beginning with one and finishing with 10. It denotes a complete circle, 360 degrees or, to put it another way, 3 + 6 + 0 = 9.

In French, the word neuf means both nine and new.

Nine is a lucky number.

9

I draw my father with my lucky ring on, from Hanoi. I call it lucky because it is in nine pieces – a silver ring with the palest of white Halong Bay pearls shaped in a grid of 3 x 3. I sometimes think of it as my noughtsandcrosses ring.

Thinking of my father I think of kissing him goodbye for the final time – with these nine pearls, these nine kisses, and with my story in nine drawings.

***

This requiem for my father in nine drawings complements a photo-essay I wrote for Overland entitled ‘My father’s body: creation, evolution and Alzheimer’s disease’.

THE BOUYANCY OF COURAGE – an interview with Francesca Rendle-Short

20 Sep

 

Some people are too good to be true, and Francesca Rendle-Short is one of those people, but she is true, as in real, and here she is, in conversation with Verity La. By quoting great slabs from her professional bio, I can tell you that Francesca is the Program Director of Creative Writing at RMIT, and that she grew up in Queensland and studied at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and at the University of Wollongong where she was awarded a DCA in creative writing, a doctorate that explored ‘ideas of shame and silence, and how a writer’s body operates and survives as the language of process’.

Francesca’s published work includes fiction, poetry for the page and for walls, exhibition text, and writing for theatre.  Her research interests ‘explore the potential of practice-led creative research’ and she is ‘very interested in the way an arts practice and the process of making imaginative work can inform the direction research and writing can take, and in the use of fiction or story in scholarly writing.  The current debate about fiction’s role in illuminating our history is of great interest to her, and her work.’

Yes, Francesca Rendle-Short is too good to be true.  What on earth makes her tick?

Nigel Featherstone: Francesca, you write a lot about place.  Your novel Imago (Spinifex Press, 1996) explored Canberra in the 1960s and your photo-essays have delved into growing up in Queensland.  What is it about place that fascinates you?

Francesca Rendle-Short: In simple terms, place places you.  It’s a relationship. I’m not interested in place for place’s sake, rather, the way the body inhabits place and the way place inhabits the body.  How it is embedded in memory.  How it transcends time.  How it informs who we are.  Gives us a sense of belonging or dwelling.  In more complex terms it evokes something of the abstract, metaphysics, takes us back to first principles, to thinking about being: being in the world, what it means for human-beings. It is ontological. In speaking, thinking, writing and breathing place, it gives us a sense of our own being. In conjuring place, all sorts of ideas start to float around – ideas of existing and identity and something happening.

It is fascinating, isn’t it?

Of course when we think of place we conjure quite specific things.  Place takes us to a place, a definite moment.  This is why when writing, place becomes so important because it pinpoints experience. You share with the reader all the finely tuned composition of the moment – the physical, psychological, emotional threads – and render that experience as if they were there.  A relationship, you see?  Relationships everywhere.

Interestingly, I’ve just been reading this morning the very latest edition of Overland, its 200th birthday edition – ‘temper democratic, bias Australian’ as its founder Stephen Murray-Smith said in 1954 – and there is an article by Marion Rankine about place and originality in Australian writing and about how truly imaginative writing ‘fosters transformative evocations of place’.  So I’ve been thinking about just this thing that you ask – how do I treat ‘place’ in my writing? Is it engaging enough to ‘transform’? Can it be ‘an instrument of change’?

Rankine talks about Chloe Hooper’s book The Tall Man, Hooper writing: ‘I had wanted to know more about my country and now I knew more than I wanted to.’

Isn’t that what writing is about – wanting to know more, daring to find out, being brave enough to inhabit a place even when you know it might be uncomfortable, even though you might find out that you are the stranger?  One of my favourite ‘writer-quotes’ comes from Jonathan Safran Foer.  He said write about those things that you are most afraid of.  I think he said this in 2005, from memory, when doing an author tour of his book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Why?  Because, he says, sometimes they turn out to be the same things everyone else is afraid of too.  Again, the threading together of a relationship.

When I write I like to imagine myself into place until I feel the air on my skin, until I begin to breathe in the atmosphere. I want to feel goose-bumps, I want smell and taste being there – on the beach, for example, on the Sunshine Coast with my bare toes digging into the hot sand when my father is dying in a nursing home, knowing he is finding it hard to breathe because his lungs refuse to keep working the way they should, or the experience of hanging washing on a Hills Hoist in the yard for the first time as a new migrant, the feeling of being out in the open, beneath a sky that is so monstrously large and so deeply blue it will swallow you up.  I want to know what it feels like again to get that jolt, feel fear.  To be transformed myself and then find language to best describe that sensation, those feelings, to bring the experience to life.

NF: I love the idea that writing about place – writing in general – might have the power to be an ‘instrument of change’.  Perhaps it could be argued that there isn’t much writing these days that actively sets out to change, though no doubt Overland is a good example of writing that does set out to say, in essence, ‘Things should be better than they are’, and Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man clearly aimed to not only document but go beyond the status quo.  Moving on from place (though perhaps we’re not at all!), you often talk about ‘the body’ – of things being of the body, of bodies in context, of bodies in time, of bodies being transformed.   This might be considered unusual when writing and reading is often considered to be a cerebral activity.  What is it about ‘the body’ that intrigues you the most?

FR-S: The body, the body, the body.  My first response is why not, what is there not to intrigue.  It’s the thing that we are writing with after all – all flesh and bump, all bone and blood.  The body is so present in life – it is what makes us alive.  It’s what we have to care for, to use (or abuse) until we die.  If it weren’t for the body we simply wouldn’t be here.

Another response is about not wanting to be a split self (as much as that is possible, mind), I want to integrate, be whole – write and read with everything I have, my whole body.  Although as I write this I know there are inherent contradictions to this because the act of writing itself splits the self – this is something I’ve borrowed from Margaret Atwood – ‘the doubleness of the writer qua writer’ – or the writer as writer.

Which brings me to story.

The main reason I am interested in the body is because of story.  Stories inhabit the body They dwell in us, they make us who we are.  And not just real bodies, but imagined bodies.  Because when we read, we allow these stories to transfer from one to the other – carry across into a new body.  It’s transgressive.

A related response has to be something to do with my feminism and the notion of reclaiming the body, putting our bodies, my (female) body at the centre like ‘everybody’, giving it equal space/place – recognising who we are and giving the body value. The opposite to doing this is to create a hierarchy of ‘importance’ (i.e. put the mind over body), and rate the mind as first-class and the body that is female as second class. It connects back to space.  For this reason I love the writing of French theorist Hélène Cixous who writes about these things.  She says that at the heart of écriture féminine is ‘the desire to set up a non-acquisitional space’, that is, the desire to create a space of writing or story-exchange where we explore the self and the non-self, or ‘the other’, with respect and harmony and graciousness – mutual love.

Of course, an even deeper response for me is to do with how I was brought up – and so not about feminism at all which came later as a surprise – but with those first twenty or more years of my life of being inculcated with religious notions of the body.  This bit is a bit hush, hush really; it’s something I didn’t want to admit to for so long, I found it shameful (which has its own piquant ironies given what we’re talking about here). The way I was brought up was simple: first (and in present tense too, to indicate the always-always of it), there is no body, the body doesn’t exist; and second, if it did ‘present’ itself and if it did exist, then the body is evil, of the devil.  The way I thought of myself was as a head only, cut off completely from my body neck down – I was in denial and very afraid.  But this is completely ridiculous because the thing is, the body asserts itself, it is amazing, it demands to be listened to, insists on being taken notice of.  The body refuses to lie down.  It won’t be relegated to hell – no, no, no.  What’s intriguing of course – ironic, wonderful, contagious and wholly transgressive, as anyone brought up in a very religious home would know – is that the very language used to talk about all ‘godly things’ is ALL to do with the body – flesh, tongues, bones, blood, skin; being unclean, being washed and unwashed.  It’s all so physical and all so delicious.

NF: How wonderful to talk about the body in such open terms – and to talk about the transgressiveness of the body.  We could go to some extraordinary places with this, but I might take it a slightly different way (because my traditional, middle-class, North Shore, private-school Anglican upbringing is telling me to shy away from discussing such matters, particularly in a public forum).  Do you believe that the responsibility of good writing is to be transgressive, that writing should go beyond the limits or boundaries, especially of social acceptability?  Or, putting it a slightly different way, that good writing is inherently transgressive?  It strikes me that if writing is to go into the ‘new’, then it would be impossible for it to not be transgressive.

FR-S: Yes, we have to make choices. I think it all depends where the line is, doesn’t it, where those limits sit? When writing, it all depends how far you (a writer) will go into the new, how close to your own personal line you are happy to get. And perhaps what the colour of new looks to you. It will be different for different writers, and different for the same writers at different times. If you look more closely, the word transgressing means to ‘step across’, ‘go’. I like the two approaches these meanings suggest – the idea that you have to step in the first place and step across something too – the line you’ve drawn in the sand, the river of currents you’re a bit afraid of, the resistance you’ve imagined – and the idea of going – go, go, just do it. I’m thinking here of the verb transgress, the action of it, the doing, going, trying, being. Verbs are great, they insist on action – get up off the couch, they cry – they’re a writer’s friend. Transgression gets easier in writing, I have found, as you write, the more your write, a bit in the same way writing out memories will populate more memories. The allowance is measured out through the process itself. After a bit, in the doing, the resistances you might have had in the beginning – such as, I won’t talk about more personal aspects of my life, my religious upbringing or my politics and I definitely won’t mention my mother – fade away and become less important. The ‘not doing’ something doesn’t matter – the stopping bit, the resisting. Anyway, boundary riders play safe, and are boring (so too are those writers who think only in terms of responsibilities: you have to set yourself free of duty). What rises up and takes over – what matters – is what it is you want to say, the fashioning of those thoughts, the impulse to stretch yourself so much that you surprise yourself utterly because you’ve not been in that new step-across space ever before: you ask, did I just say that?  You get excited because whatever it is that you’ve hit on is so new and fresh it’s like a deeply yellow runny egg.  It’s lovely.  But it’s also sometimes dangerous (not sure that the egg metaphor will stretch this far!).  Uncomfortable.  This thing that you’ve hooked onto has a wildness to it so that you have to look at it side on.  Writing in this way does take some boldness but the rewards are very great.

NF: ‘It’s sometimes dangerous, uncomfortable. This thing that you’ve hooked onto has a wildness to it so that you have to look at it side on’.  You’re currently Program Director, Creative Writing, at RMIT.  What is the role of tertiary writing courses in reaching for this danger and discomfort?

FR-S: When we talk about the creative writing classroom and the idea of risk, I think of beauty, because like beauty, risk is in the eye of the beholder.  Every student of creative writing will have a different level of risk they are challenging themselves with.  For some it will be about pushing themselves to write a story that they’ve always wanted to write but have never had the courage to do so until now.  For another, it will be about sharing their work with others in the classroom – they’ve never done this before, certainly not sharing work that really matters for them.  For yet another student, taking a risk is all about publication, about being brave enough to send their work to someone ‘outside the family’, someone unknown.  Learning how to take a risk even when it is a bit dangerous and a bit uncomfortable, even when there is the very real possibility of failure and rejection (and oh boy, this could be a whole other direction we could keep talking about!), is about being brave.  Daring yourself to do it. Setting your own goals. Striving to meet them whatever they are.  Not giving up.

Creative writing classrooms create a space for this bravery – permission to fail, optimism about the act itself, the doing of it – to share experience and techniques in order to help develop a robust writing practice.  And it does happen.  Writing students do take risks. There is a feeling of danger in the air, anticipation, excitement.  As a teacher of writing, you really do feel you are entering a new space too, like your students, a creative space, and one full of surprise.

Be brave: it’s the same ‘call to arms’ that you have for Verity La, so you know what I am talking about.  What matters is the doing of it, it’s an imperative – ah, there’s that verb thing again.  It’s not about thinking about being brave, nor pretending to be brave either; it’s certainly not a dreaming-one-day-I-will-do-it-when-I-have-time kind of braveness. It’s simply right now, in this moment, harnessing both the being part and the brave part.  When we look up the word brave in the dictionary, we see it has to do with ideas of courage and endurance in the Macquarie, also this: ‘making a fine appearance’.  And in the Australian Oxford, there is also this: ‘splendid, spectacular’.  In all, a curious, buoyant note to finish on, you have to agree.

Disturbing Dialogues, Kuzhali Manickavel

9 Sep

Alec Patric: You have warned me not to ask you what life in India is like. I wouldn’t even have thought to ask you that, but I must confess, you’ve piqued my interest now. You also say you don’t ‘actually give a good interview.’ So strange that you’d say that when it seems you’re in a constant process of interviewing yourself. Now, I suppose we’re always doing this as writers. We ask ourselves how we feel about something, and we explore that dynamic through characters and situations. You have evolved a more direct approach and often write in pure dialogue. Which is easier said than done. We use characters to give ideas shape and momentum. We dress our personal dilemmas in dramatic narratives to give them appeal and amplification. You have been able to sidestep these conventions through a wicked sense of humour, which almost always has a cutting political message at the centre of it. So I’m wondering if you could explore how this process of pure dialogue developed for you and how important the political message is in your work.

Kuzhali Manickavel: I just get very nervous when people ask me what life in India is like because I don’t know what they want me to say. I think it has a lot to do with this suspicion I have that all questions about life in India are actually veiled questions about elephants. So I’m like, they want me to talk about elephants now, right? Is this an elephant question? Will they judge me if I say I don’t know anything about elephants? It’s just really stressful for me.

Anyway, I like dialogue and conversations, I like listening to how they happen in real life. Usually they’ll start in one place and end somewhere else entirely. And sometimes a group of people think they’re all talking about the same thing but everyone involved will be on totally different lines of thought for whatever reasons, so there’s this whole other conversation happening which is comprised of all these unrelated conversation threads. I also like the language people use in dialogue, words get stretched or chopped up or smashed together, words are used in the “wrong” way and a lot of times, people will say things without thinking.

I don’t actually set out to write anything political but sometimes, I’ll look at some situation or incident and think, that is so fucking crazy. I mention Warren Anderson in some of the things I write because I think it’s seriously mindblowingly nuts that he’s chilling in the States because I guess that whole Bhopal thing really bummed him out and returning to India to face consequences for that would just bum him out even more. I am totally against bumming out rich white corporate American dudes because it’s just so racist. So much of the Bhopal Disaster contains craziness like that. Like on the issue of compensation for the Bhopal victims, someone called Kathy Hunt, who I understand was a PR official with Dow Chemical at the time said,

“$500 [in compensation] is plenty good for an Indian.” http://www.greenpeace.org/india/campaigns/toxics-free-future/the-bhopal-legacy

How do you even begin to rate the fuckwittery on a quote like this? Why is she talking like she’s in some b-rate phail movie about the Wild West? Where did she get her awesome PR skillz? Was she wearing a cowboy hat when she said this? Did she think she was the sheriff? It blows my mind that she actually opened her mouth and these words came out and they are on record because obviously, it’s just Indians and it doesn’t matter that it was the worst chemical disaster in history because it’s just Indians so whatever. $500 is plenty good for an Indian. Everything else aside, I can’t believe she said ‘plenty good’.

Did I even answer your question? I don’t think I did.

Alec Patric: Being an expert on all things Koala & Kangaroo, I feel devastated by your ignorance with your own national animals. Since you were born in Canada and spent the first 13 years of your life there, I’ll assume you’re an expert on the Moose, but I’m not as interested in the Moose as I am in Elephants. Maybe you can point me in the direction of Indian writers more culturally relevant. But since I’ve only got you at the moment, let’s talk about the micro-fiction of your collection, Insects are just like you and me except some of them have wings. I first noticed your work in an issue of Going Down Swinging we were both in. There was a snake in that story, so it seems beyond Moose expertise, and a fascination with insects, there’s also this penchant for the reptile. Do you feel a different focus with your short fiction? Are the inspirations for them different to the dialogues? Do you differentiate between micro-fiction and regular short stories?

Kuzhali Manickavel: First let me say that I think it’s great that you maintain your Australian cultural relevancy and credibility by being an expert on all things Koala & Kangaroo. I personally don’t believe in Koalas but I can understand that people in other cultures may believe in them and I always think we should try and respect people for their other beliefs.

I think the initial ideas for the dialogues are a lot clearer for me than the ideas for short fiction. With the conversations, I’ll come across something and think ok that’s interesting but I’ve found that you really have to think them through beforehand. A lot of times the conversation won’t go the way I think it will and my initial thoughts about the issue will change as I learn more about it and work through it with the dialogue. And I think it’s important to do it honestly, and by honestly I mean without trying to stick in a funny line or agenda just for the sake of the funny line or agenda. With short fiction, I have a lot less focus, oftentimes no focus at all which is probably not the best thing for a writer to say but whatever. I might start with a line or an idea but the line or idea often won’t show up in the final, I go through a lot of drafts and things change a lot from the first to final draft. I’ve found that while I do a lot of editing with the conversations, I don’t make as many major changes from the first to final drafts. Also, I’ve found that the ‘thinking it through honestly’ process works a little differently, I feel I have more wiggle room with my short fiction whereas a lot of times the conversations will completely collapse if I haven’t thought them through enough or honestly enough. That could also be because the conversations are a tighter format so flaws and inconsistencies are not only more obvious, sometimes they’re harder to fix because I’ll often have to follow the thread back to my own thinking process and prejudices to see why it isn’t working.

I personally don’t differentiate between micro-fiction and regular short stories because I think that’s really racist. I guess I end up writing shorter pieces though but it’s not a conscious decision. I really feel I should say much more about this but I can’t think of anything else to say. So instead, I’d like to try and salvage some ragged pieces of cultural relevancy by saying that I like elephants. I don’t know them but I like them.

Alec Patric: When I’m reading your work, sometimes I wonder whether you dislike Americans. Maybe you love Americans. Verity La will not judge you, either way. I talked to a Mexican once about this subject. I asked him what it was like living right next to America and he said it was like being in bed with an elephant. I know how you feel about elephants, but this is a true story. And I get the feeling that despite India’s distance, you are in bed with the same naughty elephant. Personally I prefer to get into bed with my wife, but if she’s missing, I prefer Koalas (as I might have mentioned). So what is the fascination with Americans? Are they tramping around your neighborhood in annoying ways? What kind of mattress do you prefer?

Kuzhali Manickavel: This is exceedingly embarrassing. Does it seem like I’m fascinated with Americans? I am very embarrassed that you would ask this, particularly because it’s very unIndian to openly display overt fascinations for Americans. We’re supposed to do it subtly while loudly maintaining that everything American is cultureless and badbadbad and we would rather remove and eat our own gall bladders than go there. Also, I can’t even begin to explain the humiliation of being Indian and having more fascination for Americans than I do for elephants. It’s like sending Mel Gibson back to Australia because the Americans don’t want him anymore. Actually it’s nothing like that but wouldn’t it be funny if they did that? Ok, maybe not very funny for you guys.

Anyway, here’s the thing. We have Tamil movie songs with lines that veryvery sloppily translate like this ‘If I live, I will live here (meaning in India) and never run away.’ But we are also very keen to run away also, particularly to America and never ever come back ever ever ever. We do like to sing about not leaving though and I think ultimately, this is what is important. Is America an elephant? Is India in bed with this American elephant? Should I strongly repudiate the claim that India would ever get in bed with anyone or anything because getting into bed is against Indian culture? I have no answers to any of these questions. But I would like to share some things I have observed about us and Americans and America. These are my wholly imperfect observations so whatever.

If someone of Indian origin in America does something amazing, we like to dedicate vast swathes of media space to talking about how these amazing people are in fact Indian so their achievement makes India amazing by default. We are not bothered by the fact that these people may in fact consider themselves to be American. As far as we’re concerned, they are Indian. For instance, we really really really like to call Jhumpa Lahiri an Indian writer. I guess we do this because no one who actually lives here ever does anything amazing. Ever.

In the tiny corner I inhabit, all families have successfully managed to ensure at least one of their offspring, usually the male, is ‘settled in the States’. All of them. I’m not kidding. When you meet them for the first time, they will introduce themselves by stating that their children are in the States. This supersedes their own name, what they do in life, everything. The only person I know that doesn’t have family members in America is me. So my America fascination is probably just jealousy.

We like to blame a lot of things on America. I have seen people blame America for feminism, homosexuality, pants on women, breasts in art, electric guitars, ‘computer music’, short hair on women, long hair on men, smoking, drinking, loss of Indian traditions and values, English, pornography, MSG, gun culture, drug culture, and of course our personal favorite, no culture. And while there are certainly things happening in India which America seriously needs to answer for, it’s more funner to harp on how they hath wrought the danger and abomination of a woman in pants.

We have a popular flavor of potato chip here called American Style Sour Cream and Onion. We also have a Masala flavor which is far, far less fashionable than the American Style, even though some brave and honest people have admitted to liking the Masala flavor better and feeling that American Style Sour Cream and Onion smells and tastes sharply of packaged vomit. We also had an Australian flavor. That was cilantro flavored. Lemon and cilantro. Or something. You guys eat a lot of cilantro out there? That wasn’t very popular, probably because it wasn’t American.

I forgot to answer your mattress question. Oh whale.

Love and its needs (Ernest Williamson III)

8 Sep

Artist Statement:   Love is not merely an emotion; it is a continuous lifeline which nurtures and edifies the soul of the biosphere. The works displayed in this publication illustrates the various embodiments of life and the various vessels yearning for the circulation of love as a required mechanism of sustenance and breath.

Temple of Literature Ruby J Murray

4 Sep

Alec Patric: Some of us grow up with a sense of crisis. We have a persistent feeling that there’s a looming catastrophe that we need to respond to in whatever way we can. Perhaps the seed to the politically engaged writer is found here, rather than in a more abstract sense of compassion for unknown people and a vast, oblivious planet. So I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt the pressure of that crisis and how you understand your own political motivations as a writer.

Ruby Murray: An ex-partner of mine grew up in California in the last years of the Cold War, when Reagan was rumbling about Star Wars and the nuclear war was something people thought could happen at any moment.  He and his friends used to tell stories about Duck and Cover, and how they used to practice it in the classroom, jumping down under their tables and putting their arms over their heads when the teacher blew a whistle. I think that’s what it means to grow up with a sense of crisis.

I was born in the early 80s.  I remember sitting on the carpet in the front room of the house I grew up in and having my Mum make me watch the Berlin Wall coming down.  For all we laugh at Francis Fukuyama’s End of History now, for a while people really believed he was on to something.  I don’t know if I have a sense of on-going political crisis, so much as a sense of inevitability: that politics is a process, and that crises will continue to arise.

I did grow up with a sense of the importance of stories, though.  My mother is a writer, and a consummate story-teller, and for a long time it was unclear to me what stories about the world were “true” and what were not.  At eight, I probably would have told you that Hansel and Gretel were historical figures.  And in a way, they are.  All story-telling is political.  The degree to which we’re aware of it while we’re doing it varies, but it’s all political.

Alec Patric: Growing up with a writer for a mother must have been interesting. My own parents were immigrants from Serbia and the bookshelves at home were filled with literary artifacts from the life they’d left behind. I didn’t speak English until I went to primary school, so for me, the search for literary identity involved setting out across unknown seas and there was a promise (rather than a threat) of drowning. It’s with a bit of envy that I imagine a childhood with literature growing up around the home like lemon trees planted in the backyard and grass that just needed a bit of a sprinkle of water. But I know there can be other challenges in that kind of life, so I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about that literary childhood.

Ruby Murray: My mother would never let me sleep if I laid claim to that one.  For the first half of my literary childhood I was what you’d probably call functionally illiterate.  Reading required time, and solitude, and was therefore boring.  My mum spent a lot of despairing time cutting letters out of sandpaper so I could trace them with my fingers in an attempt to get me to read, and I spent a lot of time posting said letters through the cracks in the floors, of which our house had an obliging number.

I was convinced I was going to grow up and be Shirley Temple, and I spent a lot of time at the Camberwell Markets in tap-dancing shoes singing Shirley classics while my younger brother strummed his ukulele in a batman suit and my mother tried to defend us from the hecklers.  (I was pretty tone deaf, too, and missing a few front teeth through no fault of my own.)

Then, pretty much overnight, my parents decided to move us all to France.  It sounds romantic but wasn’t.  None of us spoke the language, my parents included.  Becoming deaf and mute overnight was terrifying, isolating, and I guess I can sympathise in a way with that for you.

On the up-side, I suddenly had a lot of time, a lot of solitude, no one to talk to, and an attic of books.  And so I started reading.  Not because I wanted to, but really because I had no choice: it was that, or shrivel up with my own loneliness.  I eventually picked up the French, as children do, and so the move ended up giving me language in more ways than one, and teaching me about the importance of communication.

But even before I started reading, both my parents read to us every night, or told stories when we ran out of books.  My mother made them up for us, some that lasted months, and which we still try and nag her to write and publish, even though she rolls her eyes at us.  I don’t know what makes for a literary childhood.  I’ve never thought to describe mine that way.  Maybe it was in some ways, although I think itinerant would be better.  My mother, who is the YA writer Kirsty Murray, didn’t start writing for publication until I was in my teens.  She’s now published 13 books, the most recent of which, India Dark, was launched last week.   Before that my parents had eclectic careers, as artists in various guises.  I think what she had was an appreciation of stories, and what they can do for you, how they can pull you through hard times, and help you to make sense of the world.

Quite apart from the fact, of course, that through reading I actually got to be Shirley Temple for a little while, which helped me to get over my urge to curl my hair and sing for sailors.  Mostly.

Alec Patric: I remember watching Shirley Temple films, thinking she was adorable, even when I was a child myself. She was such a perfect symbol of innocence; of vivid life and precociousness as well. The world she lived in seemed a brighter dimension of possibility. For me, it was Saint-Exupery’s ‘The Little Prince.’ In fact, my family called me that for most of my childhood. Late in my teens as well, though that had more to do with me refusing to do things like the dishes because I wanted to read or write. But there was a deep fascination back in my early childhood, for the story and images, but also with the biographical details–> the author was a pilot who disappeared over the seas one day. The inspiration for ‘The Little Prince’ being a crash in the dessert years earlier. There are these kinds of seeds that fall into our minds when we’re forming, that begin growing with us, and become so fundamental to who we are it’s hard to imagine a different future and past without them. So I’m wondering whether there was a particular book that was like that for you, but I’m also wondering what your thoughts are on those childhood mythologies that we sometimes discover in the stories our mothers tell us to send us of to sleep and dreams.

Ruby Murray: If I had to pick one moment that was a revelation to me, it would have to be the discovery of fantasy and science fiction.  I remember reading the opening pages of Raymond E Feist’s Magician and having something explode in my brain.  I was eleven at the time, and for the next five or six years my reading was pinned to release dates.  I wasn’t super discerning; I took anything I could get.  David Eddings, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Terry Pratchett, Katherine Kerr… I’m proud to say that I did put down Terry Brooks, but still… I used to lie at night sweating at the thought that Robert Jordan might die before he finished the Wheel of Time.  (He did.)  When I ran out I branched into comic books, starting with the X Men and rapidly moving on to anything that could come close to the genre.

People are often dismissive of genre fiction, and it’s true that a lot of bad genre fiction is formulaic at best, and unreadable pulp at its worst.  But when it’s done well, good genre fiction is revelatory.  I think that art often works best with constraints.  I remember a music teacher telling me once that you have to learn the rules before you can learn how to break them, and the best science fiction, the best fantasy, is able to do that.  Take the guidelines, and throw them out.  Make new myths out of the bare bones of storytelling.  Ursula K Le Guin, Roald Dahl, E. Nesbitt, Diana Wynne Jones, Phillip Pullman, Lewis Carroll, Neil Gaiman.  Sometimes it takes leaving the real world to be able to look back and really understand it.

I think the other thing that science fiction and fantasy gave me as a child was the chance to engage with moral ideas.  Not just in my own life, but on an epic scale.  I lived through ancient and future wars, and made terrible decisions, and started to live with life’s paradoxes for the first time, which is something I’m still trying to learn how to negotiate, something I hope I’ll always be trying to do.

Last, but not least, there were awesome women in fantasy and science fiction.  Adventurers.  Women who didn’t sit in dining rooms or hover at parties or moon over the boys, but who threw themselves into the business of living, who rode into battle for the people they loved and the things they believed in, who saved the world.  That was what I wanted to do.  That, and somehow work out how to shoot lightning bolts from my fingers.  Or at the very least, lasers.

I don’t write genre fiction as much as I’d like.  I hope to one day.  As soon as I can get my laser fingers functioning.

Maps to Jakarta (Ruby J Murray)

1 Sep

Living Without a Map

I’ve always been proud of my sense of direction.  I like that it only takes me once to walk a street and know it.  And that every time I walk it afterwards, I no longer need to feel north or south, and I can walk it that little bit deeper.  I can walk it differently.  Backwards.  Moonwalk it.  From the side.  I can sit in its gutters for a while, and just watch it.

Maps have always played a part in my life: I love their shapes and lines and the shifting world they try to hold down.  I love the sense they give, of possibility, of secrets and lies.  One of the first things I always do when I get to a new city is look for a map.  I need to touch the city on the page. But after that first orientation they are purely aesthetic: maps have belonged on my walls, not in my pocket.  I could always orientate myself. And because of that, I loved to be lost, and I relished the process of losing myself.

Hubris.

There are no maps to Jakarta.  No, that’s not entirely true.  There are many maps to Jakarta.  They can be a bit hard to track down, but they’re around.  It took me a week and a half to find my first maps, on the sixth floor of Sukarno’s once decadent department store Sarinah on Jalan Thamrin.  When it was built, it was a monument to modernity and style and Indonesia. Sukarno named it after the servant girl he loved in his home as a young boy, and it represented the possibility of change and a new, proud world.  These days it’s a shadow hunched down the road from the pristine, towering global glamour of the Plaza Indonesia, a giddy palace inhabited by the sparkling giants of Hermes, Chanel and Vuitton.

I couldn’t look at the maps I bought in Sarinah before I paid for them: they were sandwiched tight in crisp plastic wrap.  There is a mania for plastic in this town.  Everything you buy will be wrapped and bagged and rewrapped, new baby things swaddled in plastic against dirt and use.

I took my pristine maps back to my office and sliced them out and spread them proudly across the desk only to find that they all cut the city in half.  That none of them showed bus routes.  That the marking and naming of streets is a matter of taste for the mapmakers of this place, and that scale is a choice we all have to make when it comes to representing the city.

And I, who usually relish in the lies of maps, in their coy deception and the fact that I have the ability to see beyond them, found myself outraged by this total disregard for convention.

I now have a whole wall of maps, a project helped along by my housemate Claire.  With the five or six maps we have we are able to patch together a vague idea of the contours of the city.

But the project of piecing together this new place goes deeper than the city maps.  There are only a handful of current maps to the public transport system, too.  The ones on the internet date back to 2007.  The up-to-date maps that once adorned the walls of bus shelters have been torn down and are now traded on the streets by desperate commuters.  At parties, it’s a mark of pride to own a current TransJakarta map, and people boast about it over their warm beers.

I need to know places through my feet.  But there is very little walking in Jakarta, even for those who know which way to face.  Sidewalks appear and disappear at random.  Roads can be crossed only by the arching metal corridors that ferry people from one brief interlude of concrete to another.  If you do have pavement, it’s often pitted and interrupted by gaping open drains.  Motorbike ojek drivers and taxis stalk white walkers down the road, hooting, disbelieving what you are trying to do, opening doors and proffering helmets and laughing.

But even with a map, I doubt I would be able to walk this city and not see the obvious parts anytime soon.  Without enough language to be polite, without enough understanding to pick up cues, I’m often adrift as I step from one patch of pavement to the next.  I can’t sing happy birthday to the man in the Police Program at work, I am never invisible in the gutter watching the street as it passes, and I can’t even understand which yes means yes and which yes means no.

On Tuesday, I drove out to the airport to greet a group of women who had been trafficked as domestic servants to Malaysia.  In the car, on the way to the shelter, one of them lay with her head in my lap and cried words I didn’t know and vomited for an hour as we wound our way through the heat and garbage and glamour of the city.

When we got out of the car, I had no idea where I was.  And it made me question whether I ever really did.  And it made me wonder if the maps we have on the inside can lie and deceive as surely as the ones that I’ve spent all these years collecting and blu-tacking to the walls.

Pressure, Updrafts, the Beginning of the Wet

The sky comes down to the 21st floor in wet season.  And Jakarta is beautiful, huddling under overpasses and smoking in the darkness, wheeling lights of the stationary warung in the purple night.  Lightning and thunder like a stage show, smacking and rolling and howling.  People laugh at each other, umbrellas bloom on the pavements in hallucinogenic rainbows of colour and bravado.  Because nothing can keep you dry, not the yards of ponchos that go flapping down the streets or the rolled up windows of the cabs.

People have been whispering about the wet season for ages, every time a storm comes over the city.  No one knows when wet season starts: the month and week shifts every year, a rumour.

Lightning hits Jakarta between one hundred and one hundred and twenty days per year.  Experts say that the high rate is due to a mixture of pollutants like aerosol, humidity, and updrafts that start the wet and the lightning.  But everyone here knows that it starts when Jakarta’s mutterings have reached a breaking point.

And Jakarta is full of mutterings right now.  The corruption commission (KPK) is under investigation, the Indonesian National Police in disarray defending their stance, the televised hearings running until three in the morning, the city a heaving mass of outrage.  Walking in the kampung last night every television was out on the street, people crouching on their haunches to watch in the shifting darkness.  Out the front of the KPK’s building tents have been set up where protestors camp out all night under a row of nooses.

I can’t work anything out.  When I asked my Indonesian friends about what’s going on late this afternoon they shook their heads.  It’s a relationship, they said.  It’s complex. You can’t start.  Outside our window the sky lowered.

Walking into the lobby of my new office building at five thirty this evening I found a milling crowd under the chandeliers, tapping feet on the edges of the indoor garden and yakking into their mobile phones.  Sitting on the edges of the fountain and looking gloomy, clutching laptop bags to their bodies and sighing.

Outside, in the time it takes to be shuttled down from the 13th floor by sparkling elevator, it had become dark.  It took me a moment to realise that it wasn’t real darkness, that it was the weight of water in the air.

I rolled up my slacks and waded across the building’s grounds to stand, already soaked, on the pavement and try to hail a taxi in the stationary traffic.  The security guards watched me from under the cover of the first security entrance, laughing.

My Friday batik welded to my skin I retreated back and stood with them for a while, looking at the lights of the cars and the waves their passage sent up over the street.  An ojek driver came and stood with me.  Macet total, he told me confidingly from inside his swaddling of plastic bags.  You can only go home by ojek.

He was right.  We didn’t so much drive back to Kuningan as wade, trailing our feet through the water that brushed against the engine, shuffling down Sudirman and then Casablanca with mouths and eyes full of stinging Jakarta clouds.

The muttering has broken.  At least until the morning, when the pressure will start to build again.

Pacific Ring of Fire

I’m sitting at my favourite table outside on the central walk-way at the Taman Rasuna apartments armed with three tins of hair-of-the-proverbial-canine.  It’s twenty minutes past six, and at the tables around me people are breaking fast and eating loudly, laughing.  An old Chinese man is swinging his arms and doing calisthenics in his underpants on the side of the pool.

Yesterday, an earthquake breaching magnitude 7 shook the city, and there was an evening of chaos.  For the last twenty-four hours I have lost faith in the ground.  All day, I’ve been watching the world of things closely, looking for ripples in my coffee cup and wondering if I’m imagining the slight reverberations I seem to see in the emptied yakult bottles lining my apartment’s benches.  No amount of beer last night could get rid of my fear and the bitter bite of adrenaline in my jaw, and the eight bottles yakult I downed today did nothing to stop my hangover.

I’ve never been so scared.

Not at first.  At first I didn’t understand what was happening, my colleagues J and S jumping from their desks and telling me in closed voices to grab things and walk slowly, walk slowly.  I just stood there with my laptop clutched to my chest saying huh? Huh?  Then the floor heaved and the papers slid off my desk.  Get your bag Ruby, get your bag, J kept on repeating, matter of fact and tight.  It’s an earthquake.  Walk slowly, Ruby.  Don’t panic.  We have to get out.  Outside.  Ruby, we have to get out of the building.  Now.  I stood for a few seconds in the doorframe, people streaming out of their offices and lurching down the hall, before it finally hit me and I began to move again.

Walk slowly.

You walk slowly in an earthquake because the world is sliding and heaving around you and any step could take you one way or the other.  You walk slowly because hundreds and hundreds of panicking people running through the twenty floors makes the building shake even more, their panic and fear moving the foundations as surely as the snapping and collision of the tectonic plates below them.

Don’t panic.

I vaguely remember my friend V hustling me down the corridor with his arms out, shepherding me into the stairwell, saying go go go in his boomy voice and then he was gone somewhere behind me in the crush.  Thirteen floors is a long way down a tiny, crammed stairwell where the doors are opening onto every level and more and more people pouring in, screaming and crying, shoulders colliding with the concrete walls as they creak and heave and shudder, when the weight of people from the floors above is increasing by the second.  Women struggling with their high heels, trying to get them off and being shoved into the well.  Someone holding onto my wrist dug their fingernails in so deep that today I have a stinging scab where their panic took the skin off.

We have to get out.

On the fourth level, I got out of the stairwell and into the car park, where a security guard was yelling for us to take the ramps.  And then I ran, still clutching my laptop to my chest as if it was going to keep the building together.  The car ramps circle in upon themselves down and down, folding in and out again through the levels to the ground.  And I was so relieved to be out of the close heat and the sobs of the stairwell and away from the stink of other people’s fear, just to be turning in the air again was enough.

Outside.

Outside I stood and watched as people came streaming out of every orifice of the building, sobbing and yelling and stony faced running.  Someone put their hand on my shoulder and shook me and it was B from the office, and suddenly both of us were laughing like maniacs.  That was my first earthquake, he said in Bahasa.  What?  I was laughing too much to understand.  He repeated himself in English, that was my first earthquake.  Me too, me too, I said, which wasn’t true, but which felt true.

And we kept laughing and laughing as other people came down and joined us, and they were looking at us like we were mad people, and we were mad people, and we were lighting all of his cigarettes even though I’m not smoking because who gives a fuck about cancer when the ground is going to kill you?  And we were still laughing when one of the people in charge of our organization came running over and said what do you think you’re doing?  Get away from the building.  What if the building comes down?  Get away.  Now.

And he took my by the arm and pulled me down to a car park further up the road where we sat and stumbled out the aftershocks, the streetlamps swaying with each other and the billboards trembling.  And all around us the soaring might of Jakarta’s business district, suddenly fragile and heavy, kept in a high blue sky by a miracle of engineering and steel.  The ground sobbing away beneath us, hysterical, and finally, finally calming.

We have to get out of the building.

Once, driving my brother Billy and his friend Piers through the bush in Northern Victoria, we had a long conversation about the worst way to die.  It’s one my brother and I have had many times since, altering its dimensions slightly but always coming to the same conclusion.  The worst way to die, we always end up agreeing, is as one of many.

The example we use when we’re talking about it is a plane crash.  Billy says he hates the idea because he is terrified of ending his life as a statistic: three hundred people die in crash over the Indian Ocean.  And we both agree that we would want to be the pilot of an empty plane as it went down: that we could have that moment of seeing the world end for us in quiet.

For the few minutes I spent in that stairwell that was all I could think of, that long-ago conversation with Billy and Piers in the dust and low grey of the Australian bush, racketing along a track towards Thurra River in the old Toyota with the sea appearing and disappearing over the dunes in front of us.  I can’t go out like this, in this disgusting well of flesh and concrete, surrounded by other people’s screaming and fear, and with no choice and no time.

The moment I was in the car park I stopped caring.  With space around me and the sun coming in across the ramp I was myself again, and the building could shake all it wanted, and come down as it pleased.  I could jump if I wanted.  I was alone, and I could taste it.

One man who had pushed women over as he tried to get out was standing alone out the front of the building as one of our security guards hustled me, giggling still, past the building and down to the open spaces.  The man was just standing there, his face appalled, not moving or screaming or shoving anymore, just ashamed and shaking, minutes after coming face to face with a part of himself he will never, ever forget.  And I felt so sorry for him, so momentarily heartbroken by his face, that I finally stopped laughing.

Earthquake.

Indonesia forms part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40 000 plus long kilometer belt of oceanic trenches and volcanic arcs which is home to over 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes.  A shifting, busting place of colliding crustal plates.  This earthquake was a magnitude 7.3 on the Richter Scale, with 69 aftershocks.  Its epicenter was 115 kilometres from Jakarta, 30 kilometres off the West Javan coast.  Over 40 people have been reported dead along the coast so far, although numbers will rise as the missing fail to be found.  But in this wide country where counting lives is so difficult…  Towns destroyed, homes flattened.  In Jakarta, only one person died, of a heart attack from fear.  Who knows how many were injured clawing their way down staircases and out of malls.

Now.

Two months into Jakarta, watching the world for tremors and the places where it will give way.

* * *

These pieces appeared on Ruby J Murray’s blog while she was living and working in Jakarta, Indonesia.  ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’ appeared in ‘Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing No. 1’ which is now out through Miscellaneous Press.


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