Negative Capability

Found Image: the porous language of a rock facade in Leura.

Winter is here, and today it felt as if it would be snowing somewhere in the mountains. After midnight is a quiet time for thought; there is a possum climbing the overgrown branches of the magnolia tree and the moon is rather beautiful.

Last week I met up with fellow poets at the Asialink event: Michael Farrell, Simon West, Dan Disney, Sam Byfield, Jennifer Mckenzie, the author of Borobudur, and the ever-buoyant Matt Hetherington. It was lovely to meet Nic Low, Lian Low from Peril, Lian’s girlfriend, MC Raina from LOCA (Ladies Of Colour Agency), Margaret Mayhew and Maxine Clarke, whose work I really admire. Mascara vs Peril was awesome fun, Asia being the new spice; though my boots were definitely made for fashion rather than comfort. I braved the cold in a strappy, soft leather dress I found at Seduce, in Newtown, a month or two ago. I’ve been under the spell of a sweet melancholy of late; and shopping is therapy.

It was very nice to meet Nathanael O’Reilly an Australian poet who teaches in Texas. His first collection Symptoms of Homesickness is published by Picaro. These wonderfully crafted narrative poems capture the diasporic identity, somewhere between home and elsewhere, a metaphor for the unknown. I particularly enjoy their realism, the way in which they evoke the yearning for a reckless, peripatetic youth spent in rural towns, for teenage friendships, mateships, encounters with, or dreams of post-pubescent love. I like the arrangement of the poems too; it’s a fine, understated debut.

Another enjoyable read is Ali Alizadeh’s Iran, My Grandfather, which blends the genres of memoir, fiction and historical account as it reconstructs the story of Alizadeh’s grandfather, Salman Fuladvand, a police chief, provincial governer and emancipist under one of the late Shahs. Through Salman’s perspective the complexities of Iran’s history of revolution, fundamentalism, modernity, war and tyranny are realised. The book is striking also for it’s intrepid description of the writer being cast adrift in the cultural wasteland of homogenised white Australia. I can very much relate to Ali, when he writes of not-belonging. He eschews the direct anger of Ouyang Yu, expressing a more pessimistic sense of isolation, which, I suspect, many migrant writers would understand.

I describe myself as a “migrant Goan-Anglo-Indian” in my bio and the author Tom Cho, once asked me why I’d made this choice. For me it is a political gesture; a way of reminding white Australia that migrant writers do exist; that their stories, poems and words are worth listening to; and may one day no longer be threatening.

Although we are globalised we carry colonial baggage. Several taxis I caught in Melbourne were driven by Indians. All were men; most from Chandigarh in the northern state of Punjab. They had immigrated without their families, and seemed desperately lonely, missing their culture and faith. I don’t know what the word for loneliness is in Hindi. We spoke in broken English.

The image is by Daniel Lee. Design by Owen Leong, whose work is on show this month at the Depot Gallery, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo as part of the Anna Pappas Gallery’s exhibit. Owen’s work explores how race, colour and gender mark and transform the body, and the ways in which physicality is culturally framed.

I wasn’t too sure about this image at first, it seems so at odds with Mascara’s profile but I’m finding it dramatic and confronting and futuristic…looking forward to meeting the Peril camp tomorrow night in the Asialink HQ.

I have these fab boots to wear, D & G’s I bought on sale in Castlereagh St after a somewhat costly trip to the dentist a few weeks back. They are brown, mid-calf length with the subtlest of gold heels. However, it’s not a nightclub is it? It’s just a poetry reading I’m going to for god’s sake…

Kasbah by Kader Attia

Kader Attia’s Kasbah is an assemblage of shanty town roofs installed at different angles to make a patchwork of scraps, tyres, aerials and corrugated iron. Attia has lived in a North African immigrant community, and he spent three years in the Congo. Depicting the living conditions of the economically and politically marginalised, the work is part of the 17th Biennale at Cockatoo Island. Visitors are invited to walk over the variegated surface, an experience which provokes a reconsideration of power structures and globalisation. It was one of my favourite exhibits yesterday when David and I took the watercat out to middle harbour. ( What a great idea of his to drag me away from my desk :)

It’s pleasant to explore the ruins of the convict prison and the shipbuilding dockyards; also a great way to experience art, with so much open air and space around you. Violence, cruelty, environmental manipulation, the oppression of political and social structures are some of the recurring themes of this inspirational and challenging international contemporary art event, titled The Beauty Of Distance: Songs of Survival in A Precarious Age

There are so many video installations, animations and sculptures to experience that I think I will definitely have to make another trip, perhaps with Tegan; it’s a great day out for families and children. For me the digital media particularly excels in the way it interpolates image, sound, language and performance. I loved the intensity of Joya Casto’s film which juxtaposes a notorious high-level political exchange with eighteenth century Italian comic opera. Ming Wong’s Life and Death in Venice, eponymous with Thomas Mann’s novella, reinterprets themes of cultural identity, ageing, beauty, as well as classical cinema by referencing the soundtrack from Visconti’s original film of the same.

Inopportune: Stage One by Cai Guo-Qiang

Rohan Wealleans' hybrid animal sculptures are composed in part of polystyrene and fibreglass

Momijigari is a Japanese tradition of visiting gardens in autumn, when the leaves are turning red, notably in Kyoto and Nikko. It derives from the Japanese word momiji 紅葉, or the maple’s red leaves. This aesthetic pursuit became the inspiration for an innovative Japanese-Australian literary journal, Red Leaves 紅葉

Edited by graphic novelist, Kirk Marshall and Yasuhiro Horiuchi, copies of the anthology sold out quickly at the recent 2010 Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne. Designed by Liberty Browne, the journal is a bi-lingual compilation of prose, poetry, and manga. The Japanese translators are Sunny Suh who holds an MA in Museum Studies, having translated for the subculture magazine Tokyo Art Beat , and Asami Nishimura, who holds a double MFA, both in Literature and Queer Studies from Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, and in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex. Brainy and ultracool, Asami provides the journal with a new transliteration of Tokyo scribe Daisuke Suzuki’s personal philosophical essay on the marvels of the cooked *soba* noodle :)

Other graftings to this 300 page cultivar include Ivy Alvarez, Jayne Fenton Keane, Tokihiko Araki, Patrick Holland, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Ashley Capes, Graham Nunn, Mandy Ord and many others. I’m so honoured to have my writing selected for a project which is electronically networked, bridging cities, cultures, mediums and languages while offering an alternative to mainstream pro-forma publishing.

If you’d like a copy contact: redleaves.koyo@gmail.com Also available from Readings, St Kilda and other bookshops.