Negative Capability

Ok, I know, I know, I’ve been neglectful, dismissive, avoidant, and haven’t blogged for two months. Most of that time was spent during a Writers’ retreat in Scotland. I had no wish to write a travelogue/blog, or use this space for thoughtless nonsense; maybe a photomontage might be nice. But here’s a photograph taken at Hawthornden Castle where I was a Fellow with Kenneth Stevens, Liz Almond, River Wolton and Donna Stonecipher (Hamish Robinson, a poet and resident Castle scholar, was the Director). It was a really incredible time and I certainly got some writing done from my room, Boswell, which overlooked a pine forest and the ruins of the original curtain wall.

What strikes one in the UK, is the cultural domination of Europe; its subject positioning. How distant and insignificant Australia seems, the penal colony, the Pacific outpost, a poor copy stranded in the Indian Ocean. I think this altered my appreciation of our cultural cringe, the search for nationalism in our literatures, the chiselling away at language by poets like Wallace-Crabbe, who sculpts a lyric vernacular; or Peter Porter’s and AD Hope’s perspectives.

En-route back to Sydney, via the Arabian Sea, I attended an absolutely awesome conference to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Goa. The Portuguese described it as ‘invasion’, when in December 1961 Indian troops entered Panjim signalling the end of almost 450 years of colonial occupation and the beginning of the end of the empire in Angola, Mozambique, Brazil. The anti-colonial movement was also a struggle for democracy, against the policially repressive Salazar regime. Among the 160 delegates from around the world there was much scholarship and creative work to share. The dialogues and company were fantastic with polyphonies of Portuguese, Konkani, Hindi, English. The vibrant, postutopian luso-colonial ambience of Goa, drew me towards thoughts of forgotten histories, biographies, fictions. I visited my grandfather’s ancestral home in Asagoa, north of Panjim; brought home books, photographs, music and a Konkani primer.

I keep thinking about Spivak’s essay on the subaltern. In Portuguese the subaltern could be described as the desterrado, oppressed by political domination, economic exploitation and cultural erasure. Sound familiar? And I keep thinking too, of Bhabha’s “mimic” man and wonder how the subaltern can speak, how language can be refreshed, renewed, deterritorialised. More on this another day. Suffice to say that Bhabha considers mimicry to be destabilising and ambivalent to colonial discourse, a kind of ” double vision.”

So today, when I came across this video remix of Homi Bhabha and Kate Perry, I couldn’t resist posting, if just to say Hello there, saffron-antipodean-luso-colonial world, I’m back, in the ruins of articulation…

Spring weather is easing its way into summer. The jasmine flourishes as ground cover near the carpark of the surgery where I work. There are bees constant in the lavender whorls, busy transferring pollen. I’ve just got back from Westfield, where Tegan and I went shopping for toys: unicorns and elfin accessories which we ended up bringing home. Next week, the ipod touch.

My lovely friend Susan Fealy has sent me news that a review of my book by Will Yeoman has appeared in the West Australian. Here’s an extract from what he writes: “Vishvarupa teems with stinking slums and fragrant landscapes, gods and ghosts, lovers, friends and family; but it is the poet’s open heart that translates this rich procession into flowing lines that wave like prayerflags over the abyss.”

Heather Taylor Johnson has written an insightful review of Vishvarupa in Cordite

My short fiction “Letter to Derrida” has recently appeared in TEXT, though I’m greiving mildly as only a writer could, for one or two indulgent words I’d used in redrafts…should “mouth’ have been “voice”, I wonder? And my all-time, long-term favourite story, “Chasing Nabokov” was long-listed in the Carmel Bird Short story award and will be appearing in the Escape Anthology to be released soon by Spineless Wonders, a new and innovative publisher in our literaryscapes.

And there’s yet more…I’ve just been sent a link to a video that Jochen Gutsch filmed for the Goethe Institut as part of a series on Australian and German poets. Jochen interviews me about my writing, my background, my interest in travel and the experiences of being a mother and a writer. We also talk about identity, transnationalism and my work in Mascara Literary Review.

Last year I spent a peaceful and productive week at Varuna, the Writers’ House, working on my novel. It was a very special time, shared with four other writers. The company, fine meals and camaraderie were memorable, an experience I’d highly recommend. It’s a ten minute stroll to the seclusion of the National Park, or you can walk to Katoomba.

Varuna are recording a writer-a-day reading from their manuscripts. It’s a wonderful way of connecting the community of Varuna alumni. Here is a podcast from my fiction manuscript.

http://varunathewritershouse.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/writer-a-day-michelle-cahill-reading-from-riding-without-krishna/

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Australian Literature is a commodity to be marketed and exchanged, it seems, in the competitive field of global nationalist literatures. But what kind of relationship does Australian literature have to the multiplicity of its individuals? I recently touched upon this subject, amongst others, in a paper I gave at the Asian Australian Writing Workshop in Wollongong. The workshop was attended by a close-knit and supportive group of early-career researchers and academics whose agendas might be more governed by international recruits to Oz Lit Inc.

But if we are to nurture the true diversity which makes our literature vibrant, complex and challenging we need small players and minorities to survive. Coteries might provide us with the image and the content of literary excellence but they can be too frequently sullied by long-standing allegiances or greivances. I think we need more competition and more equality in how the organisations that are fostering diversity are being supported by our funding bodies. It gets tricky when there are insider divisions and rivalries. Sometimes we ask ourselves the question: what has all this got to do with literature?

My guess is there are enough of us who’d like to contest the existing nationalist legacies, the powerful institutionally-backed mergers, with all kinds of strategies. Perhaps we should be more supportive of each other and less concerned with our own achievements. This has to be a community that reaches out and includes more writers, and which fosters that precious commodity, the imagination. It was uplifting to hear Michael Sharkey and Peter Minter speak frankly about this at the Australian Poetry Symposium in Newcastle, with Michael sharing his experience as a teacher.

What concerns me is the denial and the silence, the invisibility behind the packaged facades of such debates, which still adopt euphemisms like “cosmopolitanism” and “complexity”. This might sound polemic but I think we need to confront racism, intolerance, injustice more openly as if they were a pathology, a comorbidity that can and will be addressed. And here’s another gripe, closer to home: why are journals like Mascara Literary Review not being openly supported, given their contribution and reach?

Today I received an email from the Griffith Review, who intend to publish an issue on What is Australia For? to revive the debate on identity. It is encouraging that such a discussion is happening in a lively manner.

Encouraging too, are the editorships of journals like Meanjin, Southerly and Overland. It was good to hear Jacinta Woodhead speak in Newcastle, even though her expertise is not in poetry.

One publication to look out for is Southerly’s Modern Mobilities: Australian Transnational Writing, to be launched on October 12 at 6pm in the Woolley Building.

The Hollow Spaces of Buddha....photograph by Abdul Karim

Abdul Karim is Hazara refugee who fled Afghanistan in 2001 after persecution of Hazaras by the Taliban, the Pashtun and Tajik ethnic groups in his home country. (That was the year the Taliban detonated explosives which destroyed the Bamian Buddhas, which for 1500 years had watched over Silk Road traders, missionaries, Mongols, merchants, herdsmen and farmers.

Abdul was one of 170 refugees crammed into a boat, which almost sank on the voyage from Indonesia to Australia before being intercepted by the navy hear Ashmore reef. Before that he’d spent time in asylum in Pakistan. For five months he lived in Curtin detention centre in Western Australia and then lived for over three years under Temporary Protection Visa. Abdul’s extensive research on Hazara refugees in Australia includes an honours thesis – Refugee Diaspora; the Hazara Experience.

Last year he returned to Afghanistan to photograph the suffering of the Hazara, for whom Taliban atrocities remain vivid. Centuries of Pashtun expansionism in Afghanistan has fuelled Sunni prejudices against the Shi’i Moslems. Driven into central Afghanistan, they have lived economically compromised and geographically isolated for decades. This exhibition at UTS documents the daily struggles of ordinary Hazaras rebuilding their villages, their children playing in ashes and ruins, their old men mourning mass graves, their families being homeless, nomadic, the fear, intimidation and hope of a rigged election.

With heart-rending portraits and landscape documentation this is a very worthwhile perspective into the terror and persecution that drives Hazara refugees towards the dangerous journey of so-called ‘unlawful’ asylum.

Unsafe Haven
by Abdul Karim
UTS Tower Building
Broadway
September 5-October 7

Secundra Bagh after the slaughter of 2,000 Rebels by the 93rd Highlanders and 4th Punjab Regiment. Albumen silver print by Felice Beato, 1858.

Although I’ve been amiss with keeping my blog this month, I’ve been writing furiously. I’ve had some poems published and my short story “Disappearing” will be appearing in a forthcoming issue of Etchings, a beautifully produced Melbourne-based journal edited by Sabina Hopfer of Ilura Press.

August is the month of India’s Independence Day and I was most fortunate to have been invited to a special celebration in Eltham organised by Meera Govil, the proprietor and Events Manager of Eltham Books. I read poetry with Susan Hawthorne and Prakash Govil at Machan restaurant to a full house. It was wonderful to experience the exchange of cultures in this close-knit community of book lovers. Meera’s recollections of her grandfather’s memories of Independence in 1947 and Prakash’s sung eulogy were quite emotional for me, as one deracinated. Independence Day is a time for me to reflect on the anti-imperialist uprisings which canvassed social, democratic and economic reforms. Aside from a non-violent revolution there was a protracted century-long history of bloodshed, wars and mutiny. Freedom fighters were incarcerated inhumanely and tortured in the Andaman Islands at Kālā Pānī (black water), the cellular jail constructed in 1896 by the British.

Independence is also a time for me to consider the many women activists who made important contributions to the movement. One of these women was Bhikaji Cama, a Parsi woman from Mumbai who was influenced by the sufragette movement and who designed one of the earliest Indian flags. Another was Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who led the great uprising in 1857. Here she is much like the embodiment of Durga, both beautiful and fierce…

Rani of Jhansi

It was wonderful to read poetry within the context of these broader discussions and indeed to be a part of Meera Govil’s
community cultural sharing. Like the daawat: the palak paneer, aloo zeera, fish tikka we enjoyed, poetry, it seems, can be appreciated by writers and readers alike in a variety of ways.

And later this year I’m invited to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Goa’s Liberation as a Portuguese colony. This conference: Goa 1961 and Beyond is organised by the IIAS, Goa University and Coimbra University. I’m sure it will be confronting and exacting, inspiring new directions for my work, as well as being enjoyable. I’m looking forward to relaxing and eating some great food.

Why did I chose Shiva to be the cover of my new book, Vishvarūpa, since the word makes reference to the multiplicity of Krishna when he reveals himself to Arjuna at the battle of Kurukshetra?

Perhaps because Shiva is a god of the south, as well as of the mountains; the ascetic and the animist. He is an accretion of gods, a figure built from many countries and districts, his cults more ancient than those of Krishna. He is also the transexual, the ardhanarishvara, whose origins can be traced back to Plato’s myth of a lost androgyny.

I like his dreadlocks, depicted in this bronze Chola dynasty image as the fan that radiates from his head. Look closely and you will see on the right side, the goddess Ganga, the personnification of the Holy river Ganges, who according to legend falls to earth through Shiva’s hair. In his dreadlocks, there is also a crescent moon and a drug-inducing flower expressing the wildness of Nature.

In the Nataraja form Shiva’s eyes are closed as he dances furiously in a trance to the tantric cycle of birth and death. Some say he is stoned. Eponomously, he is the destroyer of darkness. His South Indian aspect is found in some of the most ancient temples in the subcontinent.

Vishvarūpa was launched, sublimely, by Judith Beveridge last weekend at the Friend in Hand pub in Glebe (photographs at this link)

The book is available from 5Islands Press.

I was a material girl last week end during my attendance at Poetry and the Contemporary, a symposium organised by michael farrell and Ann Vickery, inspired by the Language poetics of Ashbery, Olson, Howe.

Somehow in the midst of all this Jill Jones launched my book Vishvarūpa, a brief lyric moment, which some might describe as spanking the open poem as it floated through the evening’s indiscernible substances. Afterwards some of us walked the length of Lygon Street all the way to La Mama to catch dinner.

But here’s where it all happened: at the Victorian Trades Hall, and if no poets are photographed outside it maybe because they were mingling within the spaces, making coffees, herbal teas, lunching on vegan delites or breaking lines in the labyrinthine corridors and rooms of this historic building which has been the venue for many fringe events and forums.

Highlights for me, at least, were Andy Carruther’s paper on Sonic Ekphrasis, Jill Jones/Bonny Cassidy/Claire Gaskin on Unimprovement poetics, Pam Brown’s General complaints, Martin Edmond’s wonderful eulogy to Alan Brunton, a playwright/poet whose work I had not known. Ruby Brunton’s perfomance of her father’s work was rarefied.

Breathtaking, too, was David Herd’s looping lexical ebullience. You can hear David (Visiting Scholar from the University of Kent) speak on Ashbery’s humane poetics from 2-3.30 in the Woolley Building at Sydney University, July 13.

She’s a Welsh mythological figure, a beautiful woman called Rhiannon, dressed in gold and silk brocade, who ambles on her white horse into the fifth century kingdom of Dyfed up to a magical mound. King Pwyll sends horsemen after her, but she cannot be captured and always leads. She calls out to Pwyll confessing that she comes seeking him, and she would rather marry him than her fiancé, Gwawl. She would describe her spouse as ‘feeble’ in wit, and one day take the Celtic sea god, Manannan, for her lover.

If I believe in her, who could blame me? She’s from the Bright World. The maker of birds her song is so beautiful it sends you to sleep and when you wake your pain or the danger you face has gone, and you see three birds dipping their wings as they fly away.

Stevie Nicks wrote the song in ten minutes.

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There are traces of bird imagery in poems of mine selected for the summer issue of Fox Chase Review which is now live. Also featured is the London-based Hong Kong poet/editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and prose by Nicolette Wong. I particularly enjoyed reading poems by Josiah Bancroft and a haunting fiction on the fragile subject of infant death, by William Hastings. Founded in 2007 in Philadelphia, for the last two years this eclectic and elegant literary journal has been edited by Diane Sahms Guarnieri. A Reading Series also enables invited authors to showcase their work.

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I have been so preoccupied with finalising my gorgeous new book, Vishvarūpa that I’ve not blogged for almost a month. My use of Sanskrit words in the collection led to considerations as to whether, when and how I should assign a notion of difference to the romanisation of these words. How should one language be represented in the script of another? Should the phonetic complexities of Devanāgarī, with its voiced and unvoiced consonants, its aspirated and unaspirated ones, which are so carefully distinguished in Sanskrit, be transliterated in the roman alphabet? This is made complicated when vernacular translations of the oral form differ from the standardised written form and share semantic value with the written form of the translator’s language. So Śiva becomes Shiva, so pūjā is commonly written as puja, or even pooja.

How authentic are the transliterations when they ignore the Devanāgarī ligatures; those beautiful horizontal lines from which the consonants are hung?

The earliest surviving script in India is Brahmī which is found on rock inscriptions. Devanāgarī emerged in the first century AD, but Indian phonetics was highly elaborate and well differentiated several hundred years before the Christian era.

What authority do I, for whom Devanāgarī has been erased by the coloniser’s language, (exoticised by a forced conversion, if you like), exercise in using Sanskrit? With what authenticity could I lay claim to it? And what of limitations in the printer’s font, the typeset? Should I domesticise the script afterall, or would that simplification remove all trace of its difference? In considering these questions I am not unlike the ethnographer, with my insider/outsider perspective. Is the exotic positioned in a foreign locale or can it be reconstructed or reconstituted to recover its losses? Can the exotic invade the ordinary?

As you can see these were and are complex considerations, and sometimes I’m not sure how well I have responded to them. I think perhaps mine has been an intuitive response. But in the end, I am glad that the title of my book contests both mine and the coloniser’s language.

Only when we cross a boundary are we truly conscious, sentient, vital, as we break down our own categories and definitions. All art must at some point be radical in order to engage. I am an ardent fan of the Russian novelist, Nabokov, a writer who lived in exile from the language of his first dreams. He spent years revising his prototype novella, crossing the boundaries of genres: the erotic with the literary, the poetic with the mystery. And not-so-parenthetically, I note, a friend and fellow poet-novelist, Roberta Lowing, has done something similarly spell-binding with her poetic thriller, Notorious.

But I should direct you now to You Tube, where you’ll come across a video of the master linguist, and entomologist/etymologist himself, in conversation with the literary critic, Lionel Trilling, circa 1950. Go, check it out…