Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

The official list came out yesterday and it’s rather different to mine (one out of three ain’t bad):

Romy Ash Floundering

Annah Faulkner  The Beloved

Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel

Drusilla Modjeska The Mountain

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

All the talk yesterday was about the all-female list (the first time this has happened) and what it all means in the context of the new Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing. The Stella Prize may well have concentrated the minds of the Miles Franklin judges and administrators — and if so, that’s terrific and a win for both prizes. Certainly, the Miles Franklin people are making the most of having an all-female shortlist. But I’m wary of drawing conclusions based on one year’s results: a single shortlist cannot change the past nor predict the future. My wariness stands even if, as I think is extremely likely, Carrie Tiffany wins both the Stella and the MIles Franklin for Mateship of Birds: to me, it’s a novel that stands out from the crowd and it deserves to win the Miles Franklin. It hardly sets a precedent that we won’t be able to tell the two prizes apart in years to come, especially since the Miles Franklin must observe the ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ dictum (eg, Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, set in 19C Iceland, will be eligible for the Stella but not for the Miles Franklin) and because the Stella isn’t confined to novels only as the Miles Franklin is (technically, plays if no novels measure up).

In predicting that Carrie Tiffany will win the Miles Franklin, I don’t mean to dismiss the other novels. But this is what makes prizes interesting: that different readers will favour different books, will have their favourites. In his article in today’s The Australian (see here), Stephen Romei quotes Richard Neville, one of the judges, as saying, ‘We were aware of the gender debate of course, and in a sense we were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t, but in the end the literature chose itself.’ I understand what Neville’s getting at – that they went with their choices based on merit, irrespective of the politics of the moment, and fair enough too – but books don’t choose themselves: readers choose them and, in this instance, judges choose them. If ‘literature chose itself’, we wouldn’t need judges or awards. I don’t think that the judges ‘got it wrong’ (in the sense of there only being one way to, say, change a tyre) because their shortlist didn’t include Lily Brett and Brian Castro. I think we have different tastes and that we saw different qualities in each of the books: we chose differently. That’s a good thing, and those arguments about the competing merits of books and stories are worth having.

While the Miles Franklin Literary Award does seem to be in the midst of a carefully constructed makeover — it’s a work in progress about which I’ll write more another day — I’m wary of the inference that, because of the Stella Prize, the judges might be ‘in’ on some PR ploy or even that they are using the shortlist to overtly respond to pressure, real or perceived (which is I guess what Neville was responding to with his ‘the literature chose itself’ comment so it’s really only the way he said it that I don’t like). I’m pretty sure, for example, that the fine literary scholar Susan Sheridan — now one of the Miles Franklin judges — needs no help to understand the rich and storied but under-recognised contribution that Australian women writers have made to our cultural landscape — including the Miles Franklin Award’s serious under-recognition of women novelists over the decades.

Incidentally, Susan Sheridan’s recent book Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (UQP) is well worth reading. Brenda Walker reviewed it in Australian Book Review, (February 2011, here).

The Miles Franklin Literary Award winner will be announced on June 19 in Canberra.

Romy Ash Floundering

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street

Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel

Annah Faulkner The Beloved

Tom Keneally The Daughters of Mars

Drusilla Modjeska The Mountain

M.L. Stedman The Light Between Oceans

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

Jacqueline Wright Red Dirt Talking

Mainly for the fun of it, I thought I’d name my personal shortlist ahead of the real thing. This isn’t an exercise in trying to guess which books the judges will name but my personal favourites from amongst the 10 longlisted books.

Deciding upon any longlist/shortlist is a subjective act. There’s no systematic or clinical way to measure whether, say, M.L Stedman ‘deserves’ shortlisting more than Tom Keneally. All readers of fiction are human beings. All judges too. It’s hardly news to say that it is  inevitable —and a good thing — that different readers will react differently to the same book (I, for one, couldn’t stomach Life of Pi).

Anwyay, my personal Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist is:

Lily Brett Lola Bensky

Brian Castro Street to Street *

Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds

Although I liked different things about Brett, Castro and Tiffany’s novels, I experienced a similar reaction as I read them: I felt — and ‘felt’ is the word — an intangible sensation, like an elongated sharp intake of breath. Yes, I found myself entrapped within the worlds the writers created, both when I was actually reading and when I was forced to put a book down and get on with real life for a while. Yes, the stories convinced and transfixed and unsettled me from start to finish, and left me a little awed and, at times, more than a little envious. But none of that really captures the sensation I’m trying to evoke, that indefinable ‘extra’.

To have that heightened reaction to three out of ten novels seems to me a bloody good strike rate, certainly better than what I would usually expect. I enjoyed the other seven longlisted novels to varying degrees but none of them quite grabbed me in the way that Brett, Castro and Tiffany’s books did. Romy Ash’s Floundering came closest, and the end of Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel is brilliant. But again, that’s one of the main reasons that I find competitions/awards of this sort so interesting: because different books will transfix different readers. And because disagreement about a book’s qualities is something worth savouring and nurturing.

* I know Brian Castro, and once worked for him at the University of Adelaide. That said, I enjoyed Street to Street more than any of the previous books of his that I have read, except (maybe) Shanghai Dancing.

Note: I started writing a piece on U Sam Oeur’s fine memoir a few years back but never quite finished it or got it published. What follows is the last version I worked on. Crossing Three Wildernesses is available from Coffee House Press, here.

“O, monument of Independence! O, library! O, books of poetry!

I can never chant the divinely inspired poems again!

O, quintessential words of poets!

O, artifacts I can never touch or see again!

O, Phnom Penh! O, pagoda where we worship!

O, Angkor Wat, sublime monument to the

aspirations of our ancient Khmer forefathers.

Ah, I can’t see across those three wildernesses:”

I’ll be nowhere,

I’ll have no night,

I’ll have no day anymore:

I shall be a man without identity.

— from U Sam Oeur’s poem, ‘The Fall of Culture’

Walt Whitman never went to Cambodia. In his quest to forge a new poetics of America, it’s unlikely that French Indochina much entered his mind. But the author of Leaves of Grass has a disciple in Cambodian poet, U Sam Oeur. Born in 1936 in Svay Rieng province in eastern Cambodia, Oeur has led a remarkable life. He grew up in a relatively prosperous peasant household, tending buffalos as the French protectorate wound down. An inquisitive child, he became a searching witness to — and a participant in — Cambodian political life. Whereas many of the future Khmer Rouge leaders studied in France in the 1950s, steeping themselves in communist doctrine, Oeur spent much of the 1960s in the US. After returning to Cambodia he was a member of parliament and a diplomat to the UN during the Khmer Republic (1970-75). He then survived the horrors of the Democratic Kampuchea period (1975-79), during which Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge wreaked catastrophic havoc throughout the country. More than a decade after Vietnam invaded Cambodia to end Khmer Rouge rule (over large parts of the country, at least), Oeur felt compelled — due to his political views and, not least, his propensity to voice his complaints in poetry — to flee his homeland for the US.

Oeur’s Crossing Three Wildernesses is not the first Cambodian memoir published in English with literary merit, intermingling stories of war and atrocity with sketches of Cambodian culture and the Khmer spirit world. But it is the first to invoke the example of Whitman, Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot; to praise the virtues, and to reflect on the lessons for Cambodia, of Lincoln’s Gettysburg’s address and JFK’s inauguration speech; to recall a party in the sixties, in an old house by a river, at which Allen Ginsberg was the guest of honour and Kurt Vonnegut a late arrival: ‘He appeared to me to be a wrinkled fourteen-year-old boy.’

As U Sam Oeur tells readers of Crossing Three Wildernesses, he discovered poetry during his years of in the US — at Georgetown University, where he first studied English, a teacher compared his writing to Whitman before he even knew who Whitman was. Later, Oeur studied industrial design in California, but a growing preoccupation with philosophy threatened to derail his practical bent. Increasingly stressed, too, about the intensifying war at home, he began to write poems as a form of catharsis. When a fellow student used some of them in a printing project, unknown benefactors bundled him off to the University of Iowa to enrol in a Master of Fine Arts: ‘A few hours later the plane landed in the middle of cornfields … I still had absolutely no idea why I was there.’

When Oeur returned to Cambodia in 1968, Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s long exploration of one-man democracy was unravelling badly, and Sihanouk’s flawed — and often feigned — attempts to steer a neutral political course had not kept the Vietnam War from spilling into Cambodia. In 1970, Sihanouk’s underlings ousted him in a coup. The new government, led by General Lon Nol, should have appealed to U Sam Oeur: it was US-backed, it was supposedly democratic, and it sought to defend Cambodia from the communist rebels — the Khmer Rouge — who were accumulating territory and supporters in the countryside. But Lon Nol was erratic, and his government deeply corrupt and massively incompetent. On his parliamentary career, Oeur reflects, ‘I was one of 126 members, and like a swarm of flies, we did nothing, just buzzed around.’ Lon Nol, he adds, suspected him of communism because he did not own a car.

When the Khmer Rouge swept Lon Nol’s regime aside in 1975, emptying the capital Phnom Penh and other major towns, U Sam Oeur transformed himself into an illiterate peasant. Before leaving his home and walking into the countryside he burnt his poems: ‘I felt as if I were cremating my own body.’ Throughout the Pol Pot years, Oeur managed to stay with his wife, young son and mother-in-law. In a series of forced labour camps they were — in a story remarkable because it is all-too-typical — exposed to overwork, disease, a lack of food and medicine, propaganda, and astonishing acts of wanton violence. In 1976, in Kratie province, Oeur’s pregnant wife, Syna, went into labour: ‘One midwife squatted above Syna’s chest and pushed down. Another reached up into her womb and ripped the baby out. I heard two cries, then silence. Then water came out of my wife’s womb again. Again, the midwife reached up into my wife’s womb and ripped a second baby out. Two cries, then silence. My mother-in-law, who had to watch helplessly, noticed that they were both girls. She communicated this to me with her eyes. Although the action was blocked from my view, it was apparent that this “midwife” had strangled our twin daughters.’

For Oeur, there were only brief moments of respite. One time, while working on dry season rice paddy, he found himself in the company of an old teaching colleague: ‘We were responsible for drawing water to the paddy fields at night and clearing the canebrakes during the way. While we were drawing water we quietly chatted in English about how miserable we were. Dara sang that sappy Bobby Winton song, “Roses are red, my love,” and I, in turn, recited Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain!” and President Kennedy’s inauguration speech.’

After the Khmer Rouge regime fell to Vietnam, Oeur and his family made their way home. Their house had been ransacked; the few possessions Oeur had hidden in the ceiling were gone: ‘On the floor, however, I did find one page from one of my old books — it was a poem by Emily Dickinson. For many years afterwards I kept it in a safe … I carry it with me, tucked into a manuscript of my poems, hoping that that one page will somehow transfer its power to my own work.’

For Oeur, as for many Cambodians, the joy of liberation faded as the reality of Vietnamese occupation settled upon him. He worked in the bureaucracy, but his restlessness and his dissatisfaction with the Hanoi-installed government grew. When a colleague found a politically-charged poem hidden in his desk, Oeur decided he was ‘too old to hide in the swamps again.’ For several mornings, he arrived at work and recited a defiant verse in the foyer before retreating to his office. Quickly, he was fired — just like Walt Whitman, he recalled.

Oeur continued his public orations, from his veranda at home and in the mixed company of a rice wine shack near his home. His almost noble loss of control reached its apex in a drunken and dangerous — chanting of a newly-written poem, ‘Mad Scene’. Here, Oeur’s self-observation is stunning and visceral:  ‘I went to the rice wine shack, bought a fiver-liter jar of rice wine, and invited my old and new friends to share it with me … After we had all had a few drinks, I chanted my new poem at the top of my lungs. Even some of my “friends” didn’t get all the politics behind the poem, so they cackled nervously. But one man understood. He quietly let everyone know that even listening to that poem could endanger their lives. Furtively, they retreated into the dusk, one by one. Yet I crooned on, like one deranged, hobbling along on the potholed road to freedom. At least that was the path I thought I was following.’

Oeur’s capacity for almost brutal self-examination, wild and raw, elevates the significance of his prose far beyond the telling of a life. Crossing Three Wildernesses is his attempt to comprehend the quagmire of modern Cambodian history, and to honour and defend the life of poet and democrat that he has lived. It is also an act of defiance against the classic communist tactic of individuals writing forced autobiographies — some of the most harrowing and revealing texts that survived the Khmer Rouge years are the forced and often fanciful confessions of the prisoners of the S-21 prison.

In all these contexts, Walt Whitman is prominent in Oeur’s thinking: ‘Whitman, over the years, has become my mentor and my touchstone, in both what he said in his poetry and what he expressed in his essays, particularly on the subject of democracy. … The Buddhist underpinnings of his poetry, influenced by the New England Transcendentalists, represent a possible bridge for Cambodian poets … Our traditional poetry, written in classical forms, is quite beautiful, but is no longer suited to expressing many of the horrible and incongruous experiences of contemporary life.’

There is much shifting ground contained in Oeur’s explanation and philosophy. Ultimately, he extols a simple world, one in which a basic ‘good v evil’ outlook is prominent. That is not to suggest he is living in a naïve dream world. Harsh realities, and burst bubbles, punctuate almost every scene and incident. Oeur knows that the notion that ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ has not always sat comfortably with the US’s global preoccupations: ‘Democracy looked so good in America, but America wasn’t looking good in Cambodia.’ He knows, too, that Walt Whitman has whipped up a century and a half of controversy, that Whitman is often derided as ‘naïve and jingoistic’ and that debates about Whitman ebb and flow in concert with the shifting controversies of the day and ideas of the critic.

Oeur’s rigorous brand of honesty leads him to expose for show his worldview, which is inspiring and challenging but also, inevitably, imperfect. The public writing and performance of all this, including the extent to which his spirituality guides him, is deeply courageous. Modern Cambodian history is a mass — and a mess — of local, regional and global contexts, incorporating, just for starters, the Indochina Wars, the Cold War, the Sino-Soviet dispute, Thai-Vietnamese relations, and so on and so on. It is possible, then, to start out by pondering the merits and deficiencies of the hybrid UN/Cambodian tribunal for Khmer Rouge leaders but to end up aruging about whether Walt Whitman warrants so much twenty-first century attention. Pointing out and adding to this labyrinth of links can itself become an avoidance technique: as Tom Engelhardt once wrote, ‘an emphasis on the complexity of history can itself become part of a larger kind of denial.’

But the layers of conflicting and complicating contexts are nevertheless real. U Sam Oeur navigates these entanglements with elegance and unsparing truthfulness. He reveals a passion for an ideal world of peace and freedom, but because he writes and thinks with such self-awareness, and because he allows readers to judge him so fully, he also demonstrates how vast the gulf between dreams and reality truly is.

Here’s a song:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xDd-BvClH8

The word ‘important’ is overused these days but it seems to me that this is an important book. In having the courage to tell her story—the courage to write it and, separately, the courage to publish it—Eckermann offers readers the opportunity to gain a glimpse into the real lives that that make up the collective story of the Stolen Generations. She helps us understand, if we want to, that the term ‘Stolen Generations’ means something real, something contemporary, something tody and tomorrow (though maybe not ‘Today Tonight’), and that it can be something that genuinely and enduringly challenges Australians rather than makes us feel regretful in a passive sort of way … or, just as often, mildly (or not so mildly) resentful that all this inconvenient old history is still getting raised. The idea that a ‘real’ Indigenous person is a ‘traditional Aborigine’ — that is, authentic = pre-European-contact — persists in mainstream Australia (the mainstream mainstream, not only the redneck mainstream), as does the genuinely felt but dogged resort to egalitarianism, as in ‘we’re all equal these days so that’s all right then. Phew.’

I read Too Afraid to Cry slowly, over several weeks, in small chunks. The chapters are often very short, and I usually read one or two chapters at a time. It’s a confronting book, hard to read at times, violent in all sorts of ways—but one of the achievements of Eckermann’s prose is that it didn’t make me want me to avert my gaze but rather compelled me to stare harder at the words. Given some of the events and troubles Eckermann describes, the absence of anger in the prose is remarkable. As a writer who is most at home on the page writing fiction (i.e. making it up), I am in awe of Eckermann’s honesty and her willingness to expose herself. And as somebody who was adopted as a baby, Eckermann’s journey has compelled me to think hard about my own past.

I hope Too Afraid to Cry becomes a book that Australians share and talk about. You can find it on the Ilura Press website here.

My short story, ‘At Rothko’, is in Issue 12 of the Kill Your Darlings journal.  You can read it here but take some time to check out the whole issue here. Quite a lot of it is online, including a wonderful essay by the wonderful Jill Jolliffe (I’m a big fan, can you tell?) on returning to East Timor. Kill Your Darlings is a journal doing terrific things in an important market, so think about supporting them by buying the issue or taking out a subscription. Literary journals will save the world, not a doubt about it.

Over at The Melbourne Review, an extract from my nearly-finished (no, really) novel Potatoes In All Their Glory appears in the January edition. The piece is called ‘It’s a dry heat’ and you can read it here. Check out the website while you are there, lot’s of great writing.

1. What is the working title of your next book?

I’m working on a couple of books at the moment but the one nearly in the bag (although I was saying that this time last year) is a novel called Potatoes in all their glory.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

No one place. Initially, the story was very much about literary forgery but that fell by the wayside. It’s about food and wine, and my home town of Adelaide, and faith and obsession, and wanting to change the world but not having a clue how how. From almost the very beginning of the book’s life, I’ve had a M.F.K Fisher quote as the epigraph: ‘You would be a missionary, bringing flavour and light to the taste-blind.’

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Satire (I hope).

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

For the main character, Henry, who is odd but not quite as odd as he imagines he is, it could go a couple of different ways: maybe Noah Taylor (I still remember his performance in The Year My Voice Broke) or maybe someone like Tobey Maguire. The fact that he got cut from Life of Pi is a big plus for me.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A specialist food and wine book dealer, Henry, on the cusp of 40, decides that he can save the world through his devotion to food and drink.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m represented by Cameron Creswell.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

That seems such as a distant memory, and I eventually cut so much of the first draft (more than 40,000 words) that I can’t exactly answer. A few months, I guess.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I hate these sorts of questions. In my wildest dreams, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. There’s a touch of Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy books, perhaps. But I don’t know. I’d rather not think about it.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My stomach.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Given that the book is so much about food and drink, I’m hoping that the book’s publisher will consent to a scratch and sniff edition. I’m not sure how they can make that work for the eBook edition.