Saturday 30 December 2017

Time says...


Finally, we have said enough-

Time has come and told us:

I cut off your tongues.



This is the century you will die in, Time says...

Your endless, wheedling words will congeal around your mouths

like age-coloured blood;

even when you merely think of speaking

you will feel the sinews, the elastic threads

that meld with your own spit and image

pulling on the insubstantial joins of lip and lip.



Time says: This is the century you will die in.

Hurry. I cut off your tongues.



Time says:

Hurry away from your home at midnight

dragging a long, bleached shroud, and never turn back to see

that inside homely light grieving and sulking;

climb to the top of the closest hill and run with your arms pinned out

until you are flying over the hot yellow lamps of the town below;

collapse under the open whistling sky with the morning licking your face

like thirsty translucent lizards;

in the morning, go down to the sea and purify yourself in

the calloused suck and assault of the whipping waves

with your hair full of crunch and thorn and twist;

cover your breakfast wine with bruised violets;

dunk your bread in levity;

change your middle name to that of an unclimbable mountain

and don't tell anyone,

yet;

plant enough speckled scarlet beans to last a year;

smoke a musky pipeful of willowbark, just once,

to know what sweetness is;

ponder on a bottle of virgin olive oil

with the last bittergreen rays of the sun spreading behind it;

be glad when you say I am

and learn to give away your last big tongue-twizzling penny.



When all these things are done-

be honest for once with your children;

turn three times and say:

Mourning Cloak Butterfly

and the first person you see will be

the one you knew was coming, all along.

You may now speak your middle name.

But remember...This is the century you will die in.

Kiss deep your new love, but beware...he may bite off your tongue.


Friday 28 July 2017

To De- or not to De-...


When I saw a notice in the magazine, Womankind, to de-clutter my home and record my experiences day by day,



I responded that I actually liked my clutter, and I was prompted by the page administrator to “write about that instead”.   As you may guess, I am no fan of minimalism.  To me, minimalism is a kind of aesthetically-pleasing materialism. 

There are two kinds of uncluttered homes.  There are the ones that scream affluence, and the others, probably less likely to be viewed, that are the result of poverty or recent arrival in the country.  I imagine the type of uncluttered-ness to which most readers aspire would be the former.

Yes, indeed, I have visited those homes once or twice in my life where the cavernous rooms are empty of clutter, the focus being an enormous Balinese warrior sculpture or a Ming vase on an antique coffee table.  To me, there is a heartlessness and a ruthlessness in a home where the evidence of family life is hidden away.  This kind of starkness is not simplicity.  It is curatorship.

Then there are the less-known uncluttered houses, such as one I visited recently for dinner.  The friends who invited me were newly-arrived professionals with two young children, and their possessions, compared with those of most Australian households, were few.  The basic furniture was there, but there was nothing decorative, besides a picture of Jesus torn from a magazine and stuck to one wall.  I do not think this is the type of de-cluttering that people imagine when they speak of de-cluttering, as the personal possessions were not hidden away in some cleverly designed cupboard, they merely did not exist.

I grew up in a family of six in the western suburbs of Sydney.  That is, four kids and two parents.  Our War Service fibro house had two small bedrooms and an unlined “sun room” the size of a single bed.  Dad slept in the sun room, and Mum and I shared one of the front bedrooms.  At first, for some years, we shared a double bed.  Later, when I was a teenager, we had separate single beds.  Because our toilet (dunny) was down the backyard, Mum always had a bucket under her bed.  I hated the sound of her weeing in the middle of the night.

When I was about fourteen, I spent much time organising my only personal space, my Low Boy, which was where I kept everything I owned.  I used an old wallpaper book and fashioned little shelves inside my cupboard, to form floppy shelves on which to might display some special things, like a tiny vase that I hand-painted with acrylic paint, and a tub of Pretty Peach Cream Perfume.  Inside the door, I had a picture of Michael Cole (Mod Squad) which I had torn from a magazine, and which I kissed every night before bed.

I am not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me.  Everybody in my town lived that way.  In fact, compared to many of the kids I went to school with, we were quite middle class.  However, we had barely any clutter because a) we didn’t own much, and b) we were discouraged very strongly from getting things out and making a mess.  Parents did not encourage creativity.  Painting and suchlike were reserved for school.  Home was for keeping tidy, for polishing shoes, and for ironing tea towels.  Oh, and for keeping every domestic unhappiness a secret from the rest of the world.

I did not ever have my own room until I was forty-six, and my marriage broke up.  These days, I live in a tiny beachside ex-shack by myself.  My paintings grace the walls of every room, books overflow the bookshelves, gardening apparatus sits side-by-side with home-grown tomatoes on the kitchen table.   My home screams that someone with a LIFE lives here in my little cluttered haven.  No, I won’t be de-cluttering.  I will be too busy cre-ating and en-joying.  And, what do I paint? Why, my clutter, of course!

Saturday 15 July 2017

North Steyne Nostalgia


It was 45 years ago, and I was feeling both burdened and excited by the awful secrets of growing up, when I last visited Manly beach with my mother and brothers.  I was wearing a hand-me-down skirt passed on from my big sister.  It was a dirndl made by my mother from a fashionable purple Hawaiian print. Back then, it was a family tradition to go to Manly beach every school holidays.  Usually we would meet up with my Aunty Evvie, who was really my mother’s aunt.  She was an ancient lady with soft, powdered skin.  She wore a coat and hat.  Her father was a pioneering cedar-cutter from the Richmond River. I don’t remember much about her.  She was probably in her early seventies.  Mainly, I remember the comforting smell of her cheek when we kissed her in greeting.  The kiss was obligatory, back then.

Having first survived the Red-Rattler train trip from Blacktown, we would disembark from the ferry and meet Aunty Evvie somewhere along The Corso.  Whatever the weather, we would then head to the esplanade.  If it was sunny, we swam.  When I say swam, I mean we bobbed up and down aimlessly on the swell.  My brothers and I could not swim.  If it was raining or dull, we would buy fish and chips and share them from a big paper bundle in one of the picnic shelters, while the seagulls squaaarked and postured close by. 

I have lived in Tasmania, now, for thirty-one years.  You can, therefore, imagine the nostalgia stirred up by my short trip to Manly beach last weekend.  I travelled with my second eldest daughter, who had heard so many wistful memories of Sydney, during her years growing up in a celery-top pine hippie house in a treed valley in southern Tasmania. 

The ghost of my mother, born in Hornsby in 1925 and recently lost to old age, was ever-present.  I wanted to be able to tell her about all those things that were, miraculously, still the same, and the others, that (not surprisingly) were not.  Strangely, it seemed that it was not only my daughter and I who were feeling nostalgic about Manly’s past.  It is a place shaped by nostalgia, its history celebrated by the local shops and hotels, surfboard vendors, pubs, and even the council.  How wonderful it was to see the row of old Norfolk pines, and a younger row planted for the inevitable time when the ancient ones eventually die.  How pleased I was to see the preservation of the old picnic shelters, the ocean pool at Fairy Bower, the surf club, the Far West school and the Manly Quay.  Blown-up, black and white photographs of old Manly graced the walls of the modern hotel where we stayed, and it was sobering, indeed, to realize that I was old enough to remember the world portrayed in these quaint, historical records.

My sojourn in Tasmania’s verdant south for thirty-one years provided me with the opportunity to see the once-familiar with fresh eyes, and I was keenly aware of those changes, more social than physical, that, as they used to say, stuck out like a sore thumb, as I walked the crowded footpath along the foreshore.  – These are my fellow countrymen! I remarked, tongue-in-cheek, to my daughter.  I felt little sense of community.  Why was everyone so fast?  So intense?  So focused?  Many, many times, as a child, I had tripped along the hot footpath to Fairy Bower and Shelly Beach, the pavement too hot for our bare feet.  Back then, in days of yore, people strolled, they sauntered and meandered.  There was nothing like this number of people cramming the footpath, nor was there the absolute intensity with which they performed this supposed leisure activity.

I have studied “leisure” at both a graduate and post-graduate level.  One thing I have gleaned from my studies is that leisure activities are meant to be relaxing.  Let me tell you: the human river of gortex-clad pacers, striders, scooterers, joggers, and hoverers was far, far from relaxed.  Because I now have the privilege of age (I am fifty-eight) and of detachment (I live far away in a different culture), I am sharing these insights with you.  I hope you accept them in the spirit in which they are written, which is a cynical kind of bemusement.

One of the main concerns I came away with from the excitement of the esplanade was the observation that there seemed a deliberate blurring of the distinction between children and adults.  Thirty-something fathers scootered (might I venture, comically) on tiny, wheeled apparatuses beside three-year-olds trundling along on identical vehicles.  Indeed, the small children appeared to display more sense than their parents, who occasionally called out to make sure that their charges had not scootered off a cliff.  

Despite their Peter Pan tendencies, fathers, however, seemed to have more time for their children.  Several times, I heard fathers, who were already occupied with the scootering offspring, asking their partners to watch out for one straggling toddler in danger of being left behind.  There was a kind of preoccupied air about the ponytail-bobbing, spandex-pant-wearing, hard-edged mothers.  They almost seemed drunk on something.  I was taken aback when one child, having implored her mother to come and see something exciting, was met with the deadpan response: Show me, then…and an unpleasant expression from behind narrow, Cruella Deville-esque spectacles that might have accompanied the child’s request to investigate a pile of dog turds.

In the bustle of all this frenetic exercise, it would have been easy to overlook the homeless man sleeping in the picnic shelter with a blue tarp wrapped firmly over him, and his green Woolies bags of possessions stacked in some kind of personal Dewey System underneath the benches, or the elderly lady with Downs Syndrome pulling her shopping cart and sifting through the garbage receptacles. They were there, back then, too.  Back then, when I was a kid.  Walking away from the beach, toward the quay, it seemed that the real residents of Manly were mainly in the streets beyond the esplanade.  Here were the migrants, the elderly and the disabled.  It was years since I’d seen a person with cerebral palsy left in a wheelchair to swelter, without shade, in a wheelchair armed with cash tins and pamphlets, in order that they might collect donations from passing strangers, but, hello! here one was!  Like everyone else, I walked past with my eyes on the zigzagged brickwork under my feet, amazed that this sort of crass exploitation still goes on.

The Manly Quay was almost unchanged from way back then, when “Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice” churned endlessly in its glass globe, and the stink of seawater sloshed around in your excited nostrils.  Indeed, the ferry we boarded was one that I would have ridden many times as a child: the Narrabeen.  Having lived in Tasmania since the age of six, my daughter was amazed to see the iconic Harbour Bridge and the Opera House so real that they almost seemed ludicrous.  Way back when I was a kid, we used to wave to the passengers on other ferries as they passed, but waving at strangers is, apparently, a lost art.

On my way home to Tassie, just yesterday, I sat waiting at Gate 49 for the Jetstar plane to take me back across Bass Strait.  Opposite me, a young girl of about ten years sat beside her father, who leaned in toward her as she instructed him on how to play a game on her iPad.  The father mimicked fun and delight, but surreptitiously swiped at a tear.  I gathered that his daughter was returning home, after a stay in Sydney during the school holidays.  The child patiently explained the game, feigning obliviousness to her father’s distress.  As the passengers lined up to board the plane, the father held his daughter tight, leaning over her, as though he might pick her up and refuse to let her go.  She returned the hug, more controlled than he, patting his back to give comfort.  Sad as this tableau was, I couldn’t help feeling that it was the child that was parenting the adult.

Things do change.  We all know that.    But, maybe, it’s a good idea to remember the things that, once-upon-a-time, were simply better.  As a person of impending great age and wisdom, I would just like to say that it was better when grown-ups were not just larger, more cashed-up children; when leisure was actually leisurely; when mothers were protective and, dare I say it, a little less narcissistic.  I am now back in the Land of Nod, where I burn wood to heat my home, and where we walk and talk a bit slow.  I guess, after all, I belong here now. 

 

Philomena van Rijswijk is a Tasmanian author.  Amongst other work, her novel, The World as a Clockface, was published by Penguin in 2001.

Thursday 29 June 2017

Bear Dancing...

May be disturbing

The Bishop, the Gypsy and the Dancing Bear


In fact, The Bishop, the Gypsy and the Dancing Bear is not a story about bears at all, but a story about mankind.  It is a story about borders, migration and freedom.  No doubt, there are now many novels about the concepts of refuge and asylum, but this novel casts the reader into the future, a future left trammelled by the passage of xenophobia and exclusion.  It is a parable, of sorts, not only relevant in this country (thinly disguised as the country of Incognita), but to the developed world at large.  It considers the biggest questions and insecurities of our age, one of the most poignant being this one:  When we exclude the outsider, are we, in fact, imprisoning and impoverishing ourselves? 

 

Philomena van Rijswijk is a Tasmanian novelist, poet and writer of short stories.  She has been compared to both Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ursula le Guin.  Her most recent novel, The World as a Clockface, was published by Penguin Books Australia in 2001.

Saturday 24 June 2017

The Bishop, the Gypsy and the Dancing Bear



“Reminiscing over his breakfast of grapefruit, the bishop found it almost impossible to believe that he remembered such a strange phenomenon as a gypsy boy and a dancing bear.  […]Surely, that was not in his lifetime?

It was, perhaps, in another century, was it not? the poor old bishop worried.  Was it in a dream that the boy bear-trainer had leaned toward him and whispered: His name is Veshengo.  It means man of the forest.  He is the last of the wild bears.”

Friday 16 June 2017

Magic Realism Writers from Around the Word...I'm in there!!!

Carlos Acosta - Cuba
Chingiz Aitmatov - Russian Kyrgyzstani
Michal Ajvaz  - Czech 
Rabih Alameddine - Lebananese 
Kathleen Alcala - Mexican American (Jewish)
Sherman Alexie - First Nation American
Dean Francis Alfar - Filipino
Edwar Al-Kharrat - Egyptian
Ibrahim al-Koni - Libyan
Isabel Allende - Chilean
Jorge Amado - Brazilian
Rudolfo Anayo - Chicano American
Mario De Andrade - Brazilian
Marie Arana - Peruvian
Reinaldo Arenas - Cuban
Miguel Angel Asturias - Guatemalan
Bernardo Atxaga - Spanish Basque
Marcel Ayme - French
Fadi Azzam - Syrian
Chitra Banejee Divakaruni - Indian American
Michel Basilieres - Canadian
Bertice Berry - African American
Ingrid Betancourt - French Argentinian
Lauren Beukes - South African
Maxim Biller - German (born in Czech Republic)
Adam Bodor  - Transylvanian Hungarian
Jorge Luis Borges - Argentinian
Hafid Bouazza - Moroccan Dutch
Andre Brink - South African
Italo Calvino - Italian
Cuca Canals  - Spanish
James Canon - Columbian
Alejo Carpentier - Cuban
Mircea Cartarescu - Rumanian
Adolfo Bioy Casares - Argentinian
Carlos Castaneda - Peruvian-born American
Rosario Castellanos - Mexican
Ana Castillo - Mexican-American Chicano
Joao Cerqueira - Portuguese
Patrik Chamoiseau - French Martinique
Pia Chaudhury - Indian British
Yi Chung-jun - South Korean
Paul Coelho - Brazilian
Julio Cortazar - Argentinian
Mia Couto - Mozambiquan
Marie Darrieussecq - French
Junot Diaz - Dominican
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Indian American
Jose Donoso - Chilean
Kerstin Ekman - Swedish
Mikhail Elizarov  - Russian
Louise Erdrich - Native American
Mario Amparo Escandon - Mexican American
Laura Esquivel - Mexican
Heinz Insu Fenkl - Korean American
Carlos Fuentes - Mexican 
Romulo Gallegos - Venezuala
Cristina Garcia - Cuban
Elena Garro - Mexican
Aleksandar Gatalica - Serbian
Zulfikar Ghose - Pakistani American
Gogol - Russian
Hiromi Goto - Japanese Canadian
Gunter Grass - German
Jiri Grusa - Czech
Xiaolu Guo - Chinese British
Suentra Gupta - Indian
Abdulrazak Gurnah - Tanzanian
Katherina Hagena - German
Knut Hamsun - Norwegian
Thomas Olde Heuvelt - Dutch
Daniela Hodrova - Czech
Peter Hoeg - Danish
Tess Uriza Holthe - Filipino American
Nalo Hopkinson  - Jamaican Canadian
Witi Ihimaera - New Zealand (Maori)
G Cabrera Infante - Cuban
Anosh Irani - Indian 
Hamid Ismailov - Uzbek
Mette Jakobsen - Danish
Pai Ilmari Jaaskelainen - Finish
Tahar Ben Jelloun - Moroccan
Cynthia Kadohata - Japanese American
Franz Kafka - Czech 
Jonas Karlsson - Swedish
Raj Kamal Jha - Indian
Hiromi Kawakami - Japanese
Daniel Kehlmann - German and Austrian
Porochist Khakpour - Iranian American
Daniil Kharms - Russian
Thomas King - American Canadian 
Laszlo Krasnahorkai - Hungarian
Guus Kuijer - Dutch
Milan Kundera - Czech
Eka Kurniawan - Indonesian
Antoine Laurain  - French
Halldor Laxness - Icelandic
Peter Tieryas Liu - Asian American
Jose Lezama Lima - Cuban
Mario Vargas Llosa - Peruvian
Rani Manicka - Malaysian
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Columbian
Carole Martinez - French
Tomas Eloy Martinez - Argentinian
Rohinton Mistry - Indian-born Canadian
Mayra Montero - Cuban
Shani Mootoo - born in Dublin, raised in Trinidad, lives in Canada 
Pat Mora - Mexican American
Harry Mulisch - Dutch
Haruki Murakami - Japanese
Nabokov - Russian
Gina Barkhordar Nahai - Jewish Iranian
Bahiyyih Nakhjavani - Born Iranian,  grew up in Uganda and now lives in France
Andres Neuman - Spanish Argentinian
Tea Obreht - Bosniak Serbian
Silvina Ocampo - Argentinian
Kenzaburo Oe - Japanese
Nnedi Okorafor - Nigerian American
Ben Okri - Nigerian
Helen Oyeyemi - Nigerian British
Vikram Paralkar - Indian American
Nii Ayikwei Parkes - Ghanaian
Shahrnush Parsipur - Iranian
Milorad Pavic - Serbian
Victor Pelevin - Russian
Miroslav Penkov - Bulgarian
Ludmilla Petrusevskaya - Russian
Stepan Pisakhov - Russian
Salvador Plascencia - Mexican American
Manuel Puig - Argentinian
Christopher Ransmayr - Austrian
Dolores Redondo - Spanish Basque
Darcy Ribeiro - Brazilian
Philomena van Rijswijk - Australia
Manuel Rivas - Spanish
Carolina De Robertis - Uraguayan - American
Eden Robinson  - First Nation Canadian
Arundhati Roy - Indian
Juan Rulfo - Mexico
Salman Rushdie - British Indian
Preeta Samarasan - Malaysian
Jose Saramago  - Portuguese
Patricia Schonstein - South African
Ekaterina Sedia - Russian
Erick Setiawan - Indonesian
Elif Shafak - Turkish
Ryhaan Shah - Indo-Guyanese
Meir Shalev - Israeli
Anton Shammas - Palestinian
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi - Indian
Leslie Marmon Silko - First Nation American
Sjon - Icelandic
Sasha Sokolov - Russian
Manil Suri - Indian American
Noemi Szecsi - Hungarian
Antonio Tabucchi - Italian
Paco Ignacio Taibo - Mexican
Ngugi Na Thiongo - Kenyan
Tim Tingle - First Nation American
Tatyana Tolstaya - Russian
Amos Tutuola - Nigerian
Luis Alberto Urrea - Mexican American
Luis Valenzuela - Argentinian
Carl Johan Vallgren - Swedish
Miklos Vamos - Hungarian
Vassilis Vassilikos - Greek
Alfredi Vea - Mexican Yaqui Filipino American
Carlos Velasquez - Mexican
Juan Pablo Villalobos - Mexican
Eugene Vodolazkin  - Russian
Katern Tei Yamashita - Japanese American
Mo Yan - Chinese
Tiphanie Yanique - Virgin Islander
Yorgi Yatromanolakis - Greek 
Banana Yoshimoto - Japanese
Serhiy Zhadan - Ukrainian
Yousef Ziedan - Egyptian

Tomorrow I will bring you a video about Russian magic realism.The Link to the Magic Realism blog

Monday 6 March 2017

The universe found me this...


The World as Clockface is an impressive Australian
historical fantasy, but so far it has remained ignored.
Maybe that’s because Van Rijswijk’s style owes more to
Garcia Marquez and Borges than to English-speaking
writers. Maybe it’s because her story is ethereal, quirky
and complex. Maybe it’s because Philomena van Rijswijk
doesn’t realise she has to press the flesh at conventions
to become well known. If you find this handsome
Penguin Australia paperback in secondhand stores, buy
it.

fanzine
Favourite novels read for the first time in 2005
1 Life by Gwyneth Jones
(2004; Aqueduct Press; 370 pp.)
2 The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
(2004; Jonathan Cape; 301 pp.)...
3 Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
(1901; Penguin; 568 pp.)
4 Winter on the Plain of Ghosts: A Novel of Mohenjo-
Daro by Eileen Kernaghan
(2004; Flying Monkey; 254 pp.)
5 The World as a Clockface
by Philomena van Rijswijk
(2001; Penguin; 406 pp.)
6 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(2005; Faber & Faber; 263 pp.)
7 Flicker by Theodore Roszak
(1991; No Exit; 688 pp.)
8 Replay by Ken Grimwood
(1986; Grafton; 366 pp.)
9 The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce
(2005; Gollancz; 250 pp.)
10 Longleg by Glenda Adams
(1990; Angus & Robertson; 339 pp.)

Friday 6 January 2017

Rest here, Heart

This poem is my Tennyson at daybreak and my St. John of the Cross at nightfall...(- Gerardt Gedartus )



Rest here, Heart, in these cupped hands
that make a cradle filled with air-
only air- sweet and gentle.
O! rest here, my Heart!
Gather yourself up and sleep here,
in the bowl made by these
careful hands-
your sister and your brother,
both worn and wise.
Rest here! O, Heart! sleep a little while-
sleep just a while-
for a month or a day,
while the turmoil carries on
without you.
Feel the warmth and the safety,
where you sleep, cradled,
swaddled in safe dreams,
wrapped in chaste murmurings,
cushioned in a perfect bower of solitude.
O! sleep away the bruises, dear Heart!
let the tears slide away in your sleep;
let love's yearnings gently pulse
like a muffled clock in the night-
a quiet beat, a kind rhythm
draining away passion's purple wounds
and stains.
O! Heart, rest here,
in these two careful hands-
your brother and your sister,
both worn and wise.

 
(A photo taken on Refugee Day when I worked in a nursing home at Kingston, Tasmania.  Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the Ethiopian boy who came to help us celebrate.  The other hands are mine.  We painted everybody's nails rainbow-coloured. - Philomena van Rijswijk)