To be honest, when I got to the end of this novella I felt a surge of relief that I don’t have to live inside this woman’s head any more. Fireweather is a follow-up to Miranda Darling’s earlier novella Thunderhead, and it deals with the same characters, some months further down the track. By now, our main protagonist Winona Dalloway has left Him (her husband). She has found a new place to live, and is now battling over custody rights with her ex-husband who is trying to use Winona’s mental health as grounds to deny access to their sons. It’s high stakes for Winona.
This time the weather is real, rather than emotional. Bushfires and a heat wave have enclosed the city in a hot, smoky envelope, reminiscent of the 2020 summer before COVID. As with Thunderhead, all the action takes place within the one day. Winona undergoes a medical test for her seizures, then waits for her children to be dropped off by Him later that afternoon. She has rented an apartment near the school, walking around the suburbs and retrieving old neglected pot plants, like a poinsettia she finds in an abandoned house. She goes to have blood tests at the pathologist, she watches a surf rescue at the beach, she has lunch at a Sushi Train and goes to watch a movie before buying the ingredients for a picnic to have with the children when they arrive.
She is alone, but her head is noisy. She has taken to devising strings of rhyming words in an internal monologue. She talks with Bruce, a neighbourhood dog. New voices have taken up in her head: The Child, The snide Archer, The bossy Nanny and the florid Poet. They bicker amongst themselves like the Greek Gods. Meanwhile, she goes off into thought trains of her own, interesting enough but didactic and distracting for both Winona and the reader.
Is this book really necessary? I wonder. I don’t know what sense you would make of it if you hadn’t read Thunderhead. I see that it has been short-listed for the Stella Prize, and I wonder if it’s an (unsuccessful) attempt at a ‘second bite of the cherry’? I think that its sequel nature would make it difficult to win, and I think that Thunderhead was the better, and more clever book. The issue of coercive control is important, but it becomes lost and almost pathologized in the noise in Winona’s head.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from e-book borrowed from Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I knew it was the followup to Thunderhead and I was looking for a short book between two longer ones.
A thunderhead is a dense, towering cloud that often presages a thunderstorm. The sky can be blue but the thunderhead glowers on one side, building up power and energy until it blots out the sun. That feeling of rising tension pervades this short 76 page novella as its protagonist and narrator Winona Dalloway tiptoes around her controlling husband, referred to only as ‘He’ and ‘Him’ -always capitalized- trying to practice Transcendence over her small daily challenges while trying to summon the courage to make bigger changes. Dalloway? where have you heard that name before? Ah- Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and this book makes many references to Woolf’s book, and even more, I think to Michael Cunningham’s riff on Woolf in The Hours, most particularly the character Laura Brown. As with all the women in both Woolf’s book and Cunningham’s tribute to it, there is a rupture between the interiority of the characters and the outward image that they are trying to project.
I mentioned the Laura Brown character in Cunningham’s book in particular, because both women are negotiating around an oppressive husband, trying to anticipate his needs and running to fulfil them. In Winona’s case, ‘He’ manifests for much of the book through a series of commanding SMSs and calendar entries. As with Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf’s book, there is a dinner party to be held that night, and both women are apprehensive. ‘He’ is directing her preparations through SMS, while structuring her activities during the day: peering into her appointment with a psychiatrist, ordering her to be present when the plumber comes before 2.00 p.m.
Winona, a frustrated writer, is surrounded by voices: both ‘His’ SMSs and instructions, and her own inner voices differentiated by bold text and italics. These voices cause her to second-guess herself, and we- and she- only gradually realize that He is gas-lighting her as well. Her confidence and autonomy is so fragile, and she tries to guard it by the writing of lists and the ticking off of small achievements while negotiating domestic life.
For such a short book (only 79 pages) there is a lot packed in, and the tension is almost unbearable: so much so that I was glad that it is only short. I’m bemused by the publicist’s description of it as ‘black comedy’. There’s no comedy here: there’s coercion, oppression and tension- all within 79 pages. I enjoyed the allusions to Woolf and Cunningham, but the book stands on its own without knowledge of the other two books. It’s a very accomplished piece of compact writing.
I’m not particularly fond of Coca-Cola. I will have a sugar-free Coke occasionally, but I’d much rather have a juice, or even water. Which is just as well, because after reading this book, any affection I might have felt for Coca-Cola is long gone.
I don’t know who Mark Thomas is. I gather that he’s a comedian and a social activist, and that he was involved in a documentary criticizing Coca-Cola previous to writing this book. Perhaps this is where much of my dissatisfaction with the book lay: an unknown comedian or television personality doesn’t come across as particularly funny when you have absolutely no idea who they are. This book felt like a documentary and I surmised that this was the book tie-in, but it doesn’t appear that it is. A filmed documentary can get away with making the same point through several examples, each in different settings, but in a book it just seemed repetitious. Viewing a documentary is easy: a book takes more commitment, and I felt as if it was going round in circles, eating up precious reading time.
His argument is that Coca-Cola, as a global phenomenon, has a business model that works through subsidiary companies, allowing it to promote an international and western brand (which might have cachet in third-world countries in particular) while turning a blind eye to practices at a local level. Amongst the South American subsidiaries, Coca-Cola washes its hands of anti-union coercion implemented by paramilitaries; in El Salvador children work in the sugarcane fields that provide the sugar; in both India and El Salvador it extracts water for manufacturing that leaves villages parched; and in Mexico in particular- although this would apply in many other countries too- it contributes to obesity and diabetes. In fact, in Chiapas, Coca-Cola has even been incorporated into religious ceremonies.
All of this takes place while The Coca-Cola Company, the multinational, through its shareholder meetings and policy documents claims to exercise Corporate Social Responsibility, papering over all these disreputable practices committed by their subsidiary companies. At the multi-national level, they are replacing the water taken (even though this is not the case), they are ‘monitoring’ child-labour and anti-union activities, they are reducing the amount of sugar in their products. The brand is all important, and this cloaking in ‘corporate responsibility’ and ‘ethical procedures’ is camouflage for practices for which the company takes no responsibility.
All of which is interesting, but which is probably best experienced as a documentary rather than a book. Coca-Cola’s Dirty Secret on SBS gives you much the same information but in just 25 minutes- leaving you time to read something else instead.
Sometimes a memoir says more by what it doesn’t say. The subtitle of this book is ‘A Family Saga’, and saga it certainly is, as it tells the long, drawn-out struggle between birth parents and Christian fundamentalist fanatics Michael and Mary Shelley and the foster parents of their three of their children, Tom and Lenore Blaine. It came as a rather guilty relief when Michael and Mary finally die by the end of the book, and you can let go of the breath that you have been holding and think “well, thank God that’s over”.
This is not a straight generation-to-generation family saga. The book starts in 1983 when Michael Shelley, accompanied by a 19 year old hitchhiker Glen, burst into the house of Fran and Neil Williams, the foster parents of Michael’s three year old son Elijah. To the background theme song of Play School, Michael and Glen literally snatched Elijah in front of his foster sisters, Debbie, Linda and Cindy, and took him back to join Mary Shelley as they continued on their peripatetic life proclaiming God’s providence and sponging on everyone they met. We don’t meet this event again until about a third of the way through the book, after we have learned of the family tree, history and relationships of the four main protagonists- the brilliant, egotistical Michael Shelley; his psychotic and dependent wife Carole Newgrosh who changes her name to Mary Shelley on her husband’s instructions; rough-and-tumble, overweight and raucous Tom Blaine; and his wife the conscientious Lenore Meurant who suffers miscarriage after miscarriage and whose love for children can encompass an ever-increasing number of children as foster carer
As Blaine notes in the preface, he wasn’t around for much of the action of this story, which had hardened into deep ruts of suspicion and wariness by the time he was born as Michael and Lenore’s only biological child. . The youngest child in the family, he is more observer than participant as Michael and Mary Shelley continue to confront the Blaine family demanding the return of their children, causing multiple shifts of residence as Tom buys up one hotel after another, a successful publican who builds up failing hotels into successful concerns.
Michael and Mary have multiple court appearance for harassment and stalking, not just of the Blaines but also of Queensland politicians who they hoped would take up their case- a strange way of trying to win support. Within the strict tunnel vision of their religion, they are quick to label women lesbians and men pedophiles. When they do manage to make contact with their children separately, they soon alienate them by their bitterness against the Blaines and their messianic fundamentalism.
Class is not directly addressed in this memoir, but it pervades it throughout. Both Michael and Mary Shelley had enjoyed privileged upbringings in Sydney, beautiful Mary appearing in the women’s magazines as the wife of singer Lionel Long, before meeting Michael Shelley. Tom and his hotels, with the Rugby trophies on the walls, the alcohol and the pokies are everything that Michael Shelley abhors, seeing it not only as evil but also working-class and demeaning. Certainly, contraception seems to be completely unknown throughout, as the Blaine/Shelley children grow up into adulthood with unplanned pregnancies catapulting them into responsibilities that they treat with varying degrees of maturity and avoidance. As their adult personalities emerge, so too does mental illness and addiction, but who can tell if it’s “in the blood” or a result of the constant evasion and escape prompted by yet another arrival of the Shelleys on their doorstep.
There is no grand plot twist at the end- or even a plot at all, for that matter- and the book is more observation than analysis. The book moves chronologically, focussing on one character and then another, with a number of small sub-chapters, each with its own subheading subsumed into larger chapters, which are in turn organized into three parts. The author withholds judgement, trying to present the perspective of each of his characters, and leaving the reader to pose the questions: what is a family? whose rights are paramount? what does it mean to be a parent? how well has the child protection system worked here? are we doomed to repeat the destructive patterns of our parents? can trauma ever be shaken off? is ‘alternative’ parenting abuse or just a choice?
What comes over most strongly is love – as a form of obsession and persistence, in the case of the Shelleys, or as a glowing coal of acceptance and protection, in the case of the Blaines. Although the author has withheld judgment, he hasn’t withheld his own gratitude and love for what Tom and Lenore Blaine gave to all of their children, himself included.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Purchased from Ladyhawke Books, Ivanhoe
At the moment there’s a Senate inquiry into the new computer Integrated Assessment Tool that is being used to assess eligibility and assign funding levels for aged care service. It is completely automated, and there is no human over-ride function when the algorithm spits out an assessment that is inappropriate, insufficient or just plain wrong. At the inquiry, the first assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Robert Day, said
The no override comes from the fact that that is an objective outcome….If you have these scores from your assessment, you get this level of classification … there’s no discretionary element (Guardian, 3 April 2026)
SPOILERS
I was reminded of this when reading Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. My library has designated it ‘Science Fiction’, but there’s not much science fiction about it: it’s just an extrapolation of what is already here. Set in an alternative present day and in response to moral panic about the rising crime rate, The Risk Assessment Administration has been charged with investigating suspicious individuals in order to prevent future crimes, and it can draw on myriad data sources in order to do so. American citizen Sara Hussein is pulled from the arrivals line at the airport because her risk score is too high. An archivist by training, she has been attending a conference, and she bristles and pushes back at being flagged as a risk. The risk assessment has picked up on a complaint from a fellow passenger on the plane who was off-loaded before take-off because she assisted him when he was having trouble breathing; her response that her employer paid for her flight was questioned because, technically, she had not yet submitted the receipts to recoup her expenses. But most damaging of all for her assessment was the information that the authorities could access from her Dreamsaver, a device that she -along with many other Americans- used to maximize the value from her sleep. As the mother of young twins, trying to keep her career afloat, she had turned to this device to overcome her insomnia and although she didn’t realize it, there among the terms and conditions was her permission for the data to be handed on to a third party if required by a legal enforcement authority. Her dreams revealed a propensity to violence, they claimed, and so she needed to be assessed further in Madison Retention Centre.
So started her months-long stint in an ‘retention centre’ which increasingly became prison-like with 24 hour surveillance, curtailed freedoms presented as ‘privileges’, and enforced work. The organization contracted to run the Madison retention centre, Safe-X Inc., has its own internal economy. It has contracts with outside clients like film studios to have AI generated video content assessed for its verisimilitude; it has its internal laundry and catering facilities which fall under Safe-X budgets. Communications are provided and monitored by the AI-driven PostPal; there is a commissariat where Residents could purchase goods from their own money or from funds provided by their families. She can receive visitors, but the scheduling program is capricious, cancelling her visits without any recourse. Her Dreamsaver is monitored daily, and periods of detention could be extended at whim by the Attendants. In the narrative, you (and she) are never quite sure what is dream, or increasingly nightmare, and what is real.
What seems to be a Kafka-esque and dystopian situation does come to an end- the book has an ending, after all- when she resists, using time-worn tactics of strike and solidarity. In fact, the book is almost optimistic in its ending:
…isolation is the opposite of salvation…she owes her release to the women who joined together to say not….Freedom isn’t a blank slate..[it] is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others…This is what Madison has given her, even as it has taken so much from her- the knowledge that she isn’t alone, that she doesn’t have to be. (p. 321,322)
This is a fantastic book. I only had ten pages to go to the end, and so I sat on the station as my train went past, wanting to finish it. It seems that so many articles and events are converging: I just read Anna Krein’s The screens that ate school, from The Monthly, 2020; at a recent appointment my doctor asked me if I would agree to HeidiAi Co Pilot for Modern Healthcare. Do I read the screen after screen of Terms and Conditions? Did I take the doctor’s word that the recording of my appointment wouldn’t go any further than her computer? Do parents have the courage to push back against Google and Apple programs in their schools? No, no and no. This book isn’t Science Fiction: it’s a warning.
I know that this book was on the best seller list for ages several years ago, but somehow or other I missed out on reading it. I think that I had it mixed up with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes -both European animals, I guess- and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a WW2 Jewish family story at all. Instead it is set at some undetermined time -1990s?- in a luxurious Parisian apartment block. Reneé Michel is the concierge there, a job that she she took over from her late husband Lucien after his death.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Outwardly Reneé appears to be a working class menial worker, largely invisible to the residents of the apartment block who see her as little more than one of the amenities of the building, like the elevator. But she is much more than this. A precocious child from a poor family, who was forced to leave school early and marry young, she has a thirst for knowledge of the most esoteric and philosophical kind but she hides her abilities from everyone. Her best and only friend is Manuela, who works as a cleaner in the building. Manuela does not share Reneé’s interests at all, but she is quick, observant, generous with her limited resources and a loyal friend. She also provides cover for Reneé, giving the appearance of two equally humble and uneducated women friends- which of course we know Reneé is not. An equally precocious child lives several floors up, twelve year old Paloma Josse who is a mixture of intellectual superciliousness, ennui and determination to subvert the bourgeois future that awaits her by planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.
The book is told alternately from the first person perspective of Reneé and Paloma. The author distinguishes the two voices through different fonts, but the narrative voice is strong enough in both of them that there is no need for the visual cues. Both of them are exploring big philosophical questions- Reneé at a more abstract level; Paloma by observing the behaviour of people around her and gradually distancing herself from her avowed intention to set fire to the apartment buildings and kill herself at the same time.
I’ll confess that I found some of the philosophical chapters rather tedious- a long chapter about phenomenology, for example- and until halfway through the book I was wondering whether it was going to go anywhere. But then one of the residents of the apartment block died, and his apartment was purchased and renovated by the wealthy Japanese Kakuro Ozu. A man of refined and simple tastes, and an observer of beauty, he recognizes through small clues that both Reneé and Paloma are intelligent, philosophical women, both hiding their intelligence behind a surface of gruffness and ignorance, in Reneés case or adolescent moodiness and self-centredness in the case of Paloma. Manuela, Reneé, Paloma and Kakuro form a bond to which the apartment residents are completely oblivious.
Kakuro asks Reneé on a date, and with endearing awkwardness she procures a dress through Manuela’s help and goes to the hairdresser for the first time in many years. But she is increasingly uncomfortable at his attention, telling herself that such a cultured and wealthy man could not be interested in a lowly concierge. This, however, is all a defence mechanism, and we learn from her family story that her sister Lisette had died after giving birth to the child of the wealthy employer she had left home for. Shaken by her sister’s death, “Don’t fraternize with rich people if you don’t want to die” had become her watchword, but it was countered by Kakuro’s response “You are not your sister, we can be friends”. Indeed, possibly even more than friends.
I won’t divulge the ending, but it came quickly and out of left field. All of my reservations about the lack of movement and philosophical pretension in the first half of the book were dispelled. It left me in tears, wishing that I could stop the ending and just hold on to the characters for a bit longer.
I am rather mystified by the title though. Paloma watches Reneé and observes:
Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered with quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary- and terribly elegant. (p.139)
I’m no expert on hedgehogs: indeed, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one. I must say, though, that ‘elegant’ is not a word I would readily associate with them. Certainly Madame Michele is prickly, solitary, combative and self-contained but elegant?
My rating: 8/10
Read because: Rosanna Readers bookgroup (i.e. ex-CAE) selection through YPRL.
It’s ironic that often the books that impress me the most are the ones that I delay writing about. I want the story to percolate for a while, and to really craft my response to it – and then by the time I get round to writing a blog post, it has all faded and I can’t remember enough details. However, in this case, the details (and even the plot) don’t really matter because I wouldn’t tell you about them anyway. For me, one of the real joys of this book was that I really didn’t know where it was going to take me next and by the time I got to the end, I felt as if I had been on a very long journey that crossed time and national boundaries. It’s a mystery, domestic fiction, historical fiction all rolled into one. I really enjoyed it but it really is impossible to talk about it in detail without spoiling it for you.
Suffice to say that it spans the years 1945 to 2008 across Korea, Japan and the United States, with a cast of inscrutable characters. It is based around a family: American born Louisa; her Korean-born father Serk who had been raised in Japan before emigrating to America; her mother Anne, estranged from her family and Anne’s illegitimate son Tobias who re-enters his mother’s life as an adult. There’s defiance and stubbornness, coldness and detachment, as well as a suffocating over-solicitousness and emotional games between the adults of the family. But if you’re someone who feels that you have to like a character, you’re going to be challenged because none of them are particularly likeable.
There are so many themes that come through here: secrecy and shame; language and communication; nationality; belonging; family; identity. They are never once mentioned as themes, but they emerge through the narrative and plot.
The title ‘Flashlight’ is well chosen, not just for the ‘ray of light’ motif that appears throughout the narrative, but also for the writing style. The omniscient third-person narrator moves from one character to another, but unlike many recent books that I have read that barely alight on one character before bouncing off onto the next one, this book stayed with each character for long enough that you felt you knew them, and at least can understand their perspective, even if you don’t share it. In fact, as readers, we know the characters better than the characters know each other, or than the characters even know themselves. Although there are connections between each character and the others, the emphasis is on one character at a time, in the same way that a flashlight can only illuminate one thing in isolation.
It is a long book- 445 pages- but I didn’t feel that it dragged. But perhaps that’s because I’m interested in Korean history: I know that other people in the Reading Circle did feel that it was far too long. It’s ambitious; it has a big story; the writer is control throughout and she takes responsibility for her story, instead of expecting the reader to put the bits together.
If there’s any disappointment here, it’s with myself. I know that I haven’t done justice to this book, because the surprises in the plot are the real strength of the narrative. All I can say is, read it for yourself.
Has anyone ever complained so much about reading a book? At 1.6kg, I found it too heavy to hold up while reading it in bed and having recently sprained my knee, I was not keen on ‘tenting’ my knees to lean the book against. At over 1000 pages long, it took two renewals at the library to complete, and even now as I write this review, it is overdue.
So why did I so willingly heft it off the floor each night, to keep reading? Quite simply, because I enjoyed the company of the author and once I gave up any idea of following an argument, I just floated along on his observations – a little bit like reading Proust, really.
The lengthy subtitle of the book is “Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today” and this is the overall theme of the book, but it is intermingled with reminiscence, nostalgia, regret and curiosity as he travels around Europe researching his topic. It could just as easily be a travel book. Attracted to maps from childhood, he maps out the sites of concentration camps of Europe and their accompanying industrial infrastructure, he follows forced marches and places himself in massacre sites, forming his own mental and physical maps. And it could just as easily be an ecological/environmental diary of landscape. For him, the environment in which he holes up to immerse himself in his writing – the Suffolk Coast for Book One in winter; Pembrokeshire in spring in Book Two- becomes part of the narrative as well, particularly when he writes about a hurricane that buffets the cottage in which he is sheltering when the power goes out in the house he has rented.
Gretton himself is an activist as well as author and teacher. In 1983 he co-founded the political arts organization Platform, which describes itself on its website as bringing together workers and communities “to create new, liberatory systems that tackle injustice and climate breakdown”. In particular, it confronts the power of transnational corporations. You can see this emphasis coming through in this book in its focus on corporations; especially that of the German manufacturing, banking and insurance companies that still exist powerfully today, which had flourished in Nazi Germany through its contacts and contracts with the government. He also targets Shell and its influence in Nigeria that looked the other way during the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the activist who died trying to save his land and people from the destruction of Shell’s oil conglomerate. The “desk killers’ that he focuses on here are the managing directors of wealthy, multinational corporations, many of whom he interviewed after they have retired, and the often invisible bureaucrats and office workers who followed the procedures and timetables and the accountants in charge of the financial accounts that made genocide an anonymized, abstraction. There are no innocents here.
Although his focus is on corporations, he also hones in on individuals – most particularly Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, whose own biography and the work of Gitta Sereny has thrown up so many questions about culpability and redemption. He also spends quite a bit of time on the Wannsee Conference of 20th January 1942, which pulled together as many agencies as possible to discuss the implementation of ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’. Of the 15 attendees (there were actually 16, counting the unnamed stenographer), seven held PhDs in law. We only know this because just one copy survived of the thirty copies made at the time. He parallels this with a discussion of the two Washington lawyers, who prepared memos for the Bush administration discussing the legalities and grey areas of torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.
Then there are the individuals who survived: Primo Levi, Jan Karski, Elie Wiesel. Some of the testimony in these books kept me awake at night, after turning off the light.
He concentrates predominantly on Nazi Germany, and on Nigeria to a lesser degree. But he also turns back to history to take up Gunther Grass’ question about how young people grow up in Britain and know so little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. He looks at the East India Company and the Opium Wars, the slave trade, the Irish Famine, and what he claims as “the genocide” and the “extermination” of the Tasmanian Aboriginals (a contested question here in Australia, where there is a continuing Tasmanian First Peoples community today)[As an aside, if you’re looking a desk killers, I would have focused more on later bureaucrats and Protectors in the late 19th-early 20th century Australia whose arbitrary and desk-bound decisions did just as much as outright massacres to distort indigenous families and expunge language and culture]. He spends quite a bit of time on Namibia (former German South West Africa) where the systematic killing, detention and forced labour of the Nama and Herero people was a forerunner to actions undertaken by the Nazi government. He looks at the French massacre of between 120 and 200 Algerian demonstrators by the French government on 17 October 1961.
All of which would be pretty grim, continuing for over 1000 pages, if this were all that this book contains. But it’s not. There’s beautiful writing about his father and a wistful recounting of his own torrid, passionate affair with a younger man. There’s information dumps at time, as if you’re reading someone’s research notes. Interwoven are his own childhood memories, his political stances, travel-journey type entries.
It’s big; it’s untidy; it’s completely indulgent but it’s also thought-provoking and very easy to read. My complaints about weight and heft not withstanding, I missed hearing Dan Gretton’s voice when I finished. But perhaps there’s more: apparently this 1000+ pager is just Volume 1 of a two-volume publication. Hopefully the next volume will have an index, which I really missed in a book of this size. Will I read Volume II when it comes out: most probably, if I still have the strength to hold a 1.6 kg book!
My rating: Hard to say. 9?
Read because: I read or heard someone raving about it- can’t remember who.
I feel a bit naive. As part of the standard Christmas schlock, there’s usually a TV report from Bethlehem where brief mention is made of the Christian congregations that celebrate Christmas, often supplemented by Christian pilgrims from other countries, most particularly the United States. It has never occurred to me to think about the status of Christian Palestinians who continue to live there beyond Christmas, and how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict affects them. I have become so accustomed to linking Palestinian with Muslim, that I’ve forgotten that Palestinians can be of any religion.
And so ‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate’ is a brisk corrective to this ignorance. The author, Micaela Sahhar, comes from a Christian family: at first an Orthodox family, then later some family members were born again into a more evangelical brand of Christianity. Following the Nakba her extended family has splinters: some come to Australia and settle in Newport and Williamstown, many others emigrate to America, and some stay. Michaela herself was born in Australia, and does not subscribe to any particular faith. Her father is Palestinian but was born in Jordan, because he was born within days of his family fleeing Jerusalem in the wake of the bombing of the Semiaris Hotel by Jewish terrorists, the Haganah, as part of the ‘de-Arabization’ of West Jerusalem. Just as important in this book are her grandparents, particular Pa and Ellen, who emigrated to Australia as part of the family shift. She has grown up with the stories of her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and great-grandparents, and the photos that testify that – yes- the family lived in Jerusalem, no matter how much their presence and identity as Christian Palestinians has been denied.
This book is a piecing together of the stories of the different generations of her family, with stories and photographs interwoven. She travels to America to meet branches of the family, and returns to Jerusalem and Jaffa to locate the places where they lived, and to find that her family is still remembered by the people who stayed. Palestinians- Christian and Muslim- face the same appropriation (theft) of land and livelihood, and they are subjected to the same surveillance and humiliation by the Israeli military forces. This is a personal, family pilgrimage, but it also part of her academic identity, explored through a Ph D, and so bolstered by subtly placed quotations of historians and activists. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on ‘Mr Settler Colonialism’ where she writes about her friendship with the late Patrick Wolfe, who I also knew, and who died far too young but whose influence is still powerful- if anything, with the destruction of Gaza it is even more plangent.
There’s a beautiful piece of writing at the close of the book where she dreams of returning to Jerusalem, standing in her Pa’s garden and speak to her grandparents:
I would like to say to my Pa and to Ellen that nothing is truly gone if you know how to look, to say, look here, I have built our beautiful home out of words, a house Pa built twice in his life already, first in Jerusalem and then with the shape of his key in the eye of his mind. One day I will…[shout] I am I. And I am here. And when I do, I know that Ellen and Pa will be with me too.
I will shout this at the intersection of Mamillah, and on the balcony of the house my Pa built, and I will give what voice I have to the most joyous euphonia of the Palestinians returning to our once and future home, with the dead on our shoulders and the living in our arms. We will burst through the gates of the Old City and roam the New Jerusalem from the Greek Colony to Talbiyeh, from Qatamon to Baq’a, sweeping south to Gaza and north to the Galilee, and to all the places we are indivisibly from and that are ours. And as I cross the threshold of my grandfather’s house, I will lay my burden down.
And if it should not be me, then it will be another, when I will be an ancestor and those that I have loved will all be stars. (p. 263)
But this really strong, affecting and ultimately defiant and hopeful ending is not enough to overcome my other qualms with the book. The subtitle of the book is ‘An Encyclopedia of a Palestinian Family’, and it does reflect the fragmentary, all-embracing nature of an encyclopedia. But few of us would read an encyclopedia by choice, and this does not have the genre-structure of an encyclopedia: it is not alphabetical, there is no index. There are 48 chapters, between 5-10 pages in length. The chronology and setting skip about, and right up to the end of the book I found myself having to refer to the family tree at the back of the book to work out who this person was because there were just so many, and only a few were fleshed out to be instantly recognizable.
I know that I’ve been complaining about these short, almost kaleidescopic mosaic books that seem to be so popular at the moment, and here I am doing so again. Any one of these chapters, except the last one, could have been placed anywhere, and with each one it felt like a carefully polished piece of discrete writing, almost more like a journal article or the product of a writing workshop rather than of an overarching structure. Perhaps I’m showing my age, but it all feels so filmic and the product and fodder of a short attention span. Perhaps I’m too old for all this and need something more 19th or 20th century in structure, staying well away from anything that has ‘fragmentary’ ‘gaps’ or ‘blank spaces’ in its description.
My rating:7.5/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I saw that it won the non-fiction category of the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards.
The subtitle of this book is ‘ecobiographical essays’. What a many-stranded thing biography is becoming! Jessica White, the author of these essays and other academic work in the field, defines ‘ecobiography’ on her website in this way:
While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.
This double focus – i.e. deafness or Deafness (she notes the distinctions of that capital letter) as both identity and medical condition, and the physical environment- permeates these essays, which range across both her personal and academic experiences. I admit that I’m not absolutely convinced that her approach needs the specific genre-descriptor of ‘ecobiography’ : is really a separate strand of biography or just a particular consciousness of environment on the part of the subject or on the part of the narrator?. In locating them as essays, she picks up on the etymology of the word ‘essay’ as her attempt to ‘trial’ and ‘try’ her responses to a subject, and to explore her own identity as woman and writer, after the death of her mother.
There are a number of themes that emerge through this collection of eleven essays. The first, as suggested by the title, is that of deafness. “Silence is my habitat” was a comment that the poet Judith Wright made to Heather Rusden in a 1990 interview, one of the few times that Wright discussed her increasing deafness. Reflecting, perhaps, the emphasis on identity in the intervening thirty years, White seems almost frustrated that there are no specific references to deafness in Wright’s poetry, although she and other scholars have detected it in the ‘negative poetics’ of her work- singing the praises of the natural world while acknowledging the inadequacy of words to describe it. When asked why she had not chosen to write about her deafness, Wright replied “Oh, I wouldn’t say it was a choice. I haven’t felt that it was an important part of my life in that way” (p.74). That could not be said of Jessica White. She writes of how meningitis as a three-year old robbed her of all hearing in her left ear, half the hearing in her right ear, and possibly some scarring on her brain (p. 17). She consciously seeks out writers who are conscious of sound and deafness including Fiona Murphy, poet Ilya Kamisky and the online Deaf History Collection of the writing, images and artefacts of deaf people. She explains the difficulties of architecture and the design of academic teaching at university, and how it has exacerbated the workload of a deaf tutor. She titles her essay about the shutdown of borders with COVID as “We Were All Deaf During the Pandemic”.
White shares with Judith Wright a deep environmental consciousness, which she expresses in her essay on Golden Orb spiders in her essay “Quintessence” and bird song- which she can hear- in the essay “On the Wing”. This alertness to the natural world runs through White’s academic work on Georgiana Molloy, the West Australian botanist who arrived in 1830. Molloy appears in the chapters “Intertwining” and ” Unseamed”, while White’s own grappling with her research and writing about Georgiana Molloy filters across different essays. In “Intertwining” where she describes Molloy’s experience in childbirth and loss of infant children, she explores – very honestly- her own yearning for a child, set against her partner’s refusal to have children, and her own awareness that the time for having a child was passing.
“The Breath Goes Now” focusses on her mother’s death: always a confronting event, the tenor of which is often shaped by the relationship between mother and child. In White’s case, it was her mother who was encouraging her to finish her book on Georgiana Molloy before she died- a comment made only half in just as her mother’s chronic lung weakness was curtailing her activities and life. Indeed, these essays emerged as a response to her mother’s death, when she found the architecture of her book and all those words collapsing. Ah Jessica- the death of the remaining parent is another event to be confronted yet, with all the questions it raises about your own identity as child when you no longer have parents.
These essays are beautifully written, as they approach her overarching themes tentatively, circling around them, advancing towards them, then retreating or splintering off to other safer ground before moving forward (literally essay-ing) again. Most of them are between 10-20 pages in length containing many short shards, like a flow of thoughts, asterisked to separate each one from the other, which is a writing style and fashion I am becoming less enthusiastic about, I must admit. They are very honest, especially those describing her relationship with her partner Bruce: perhaps too honest, when she re-reads them twenty years hence? But this honesty is also what gives the reader a feeling of intimacy with the author: a Garner-esque feeling that you have been having a good chat with an intelligent, sensitive friend.
My rating: 8.5/10
Read because: I encountered Jessica in the Australian Womens Writers Challenge a few years back, was aware of her work on Georgiana Molloy, and was interested to see what she’s doing now. Or does that just mean ‘nosiness’?
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 