Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: literature

  • mud road

    We are walking down the road in the middle of the night. The road is made of mud. Our new home is in a village and it has no address. An urban village, lapped on all sides with villages that make up to capitol, one storey high and crowded with tiny chickens and little soon to be eaten goats as far as I can see.

    Should I look nicer, I said, tonight on our way out, rumpled in my unironed skirt. Oh no, he said, Cathoel you are a white lady – you always look dressed up automatically.

    Every time he remarks, casually at the door when I have loaded him with parcels, “My loads are plenty,” or, when after a cross cross-cultural fight we start really finally hearing each other, or when he pronounces ‘automatically’ with its six distinct syllables as indeed it deserves, or when I say ‘hippopotamus’ and reduce him to peels of crying laughter — each time I fall a little bit deeper into love as though it were a big bowl of soup.

    Here is a church. Already they are moaning and they’re wringing their hands. One lady paces foot to foot, waiting for transportation to start and eulogy to have set in. The whole road will have to listen to their dismal rejoicing. Further along, a few shops are still open. One is called Reggae Spot, selling tins of condensed milk and mosquito coils, though Ghanaians laugh at malaria.

    On the weekend we rode nearly ten hours north on bad roads festooned with craters in a tiny bus leaking dust from its frayed with rust underside. Under my mother in law’s mango tree I asked her when she offered tea, do you have any condensed milk? No, she said, I only have normal milk – producing a tiny costly can of condensed Carnation milk, as normal as canned be.

    In our village house the water is piped in from a truck to a large polytank on a concrete stand. A chicken is roosting on her nine eggs in one of the pots I have planted and I greet her every morning, “Good morning, Lady Chicken, still working hard I see.” I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert, another white lady dressed up in her handknit white life who took an entire year away from work and spent it in Italy (eating), in India (praying), and on Bali (falling in love). Her book Eat, Pray, Love became such a sensation and attracted so many privileged rich seekers to the island that Balinese took to wearing t shirts which said Eat, Pray, Leave.

    In her ashram Gilbert riffs through two pages of the startling innocence that characterises unearnt privilege. Americans don’t know how the rest of the world sees them; men don’t know that women understand them all too well. When she writes of her friendship with her fellow floor scrubber Tulsi, she describes the girl as ‘cute.’ Tulsi is far cuter now that her glasses have smashed, and due to poverty she cannot afford to replace them. “Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl you ever saw,” Gilbert writes, calling up one of a wardrobe of Indian tropes she has prepared earlier, “even cuter since one lens of her ‘specs’ (as she calls her eyeglasses) broke last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them.”

    It doesn’t seem to occur to the author who is scrubbing floors voluntarily as part of her search into herself that looking out from inside that webbed lens might not be pleasant. That being unable to do without the glasses now smashed and damaged is not the same as a cute, manga-kid stubbornness refusing to give up a favourite garment which has torn.

    Tulsi describes her prospects: she will turn eighteen soon and will be married off to some boy she dislikes, or is indifferent to. A “teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family,” she loves hiphop and lists for her oblivious interlocuter, oh, so interlocutely, the flaws which can prevent a girl from marrying. Her skin is too dark. She is old, 28 for example. Her horoscope is wrong. Not one of these flaws is anything a girl can do anything about, except that she must not be too educated, or have had an affair with someone.

    We’re left wondering if in the conversation itself Gilbert found the time to commiserate with her feisty, spirited, trapped companion or whether she just floated directly from this listing of someone else’s sufferings – so many someones – into fresh contemplation of her own inner self. “I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian society… At least my skin is fair,” she concludes, innocently. “I have only this in my favour.”

    Meanwhile in this village house, which we intend to rent out as a kind of guesthouse so that other privileged oblivious whites can come here with their cameras and render all our neighbours objects in the background of their own selfies, I am scouring and cleaning too. When I bought this broom the woman who had made it asked, “But do you know how to use it, though?” By turning it upside down and stabbing the dirt I made her laugh. “Like this, right?” I am too shy some days to leave the house. I feel like an intruder. Daughter and grand daughter of intruders. We have stolen so much. Africa produces 75% of the cocoa that fuels the world’s $75 billion chocolate industry, and earns 2% of the profits. Like an American in her ashram I am doing what I can, so lazily, so slowly, to clear away the cobwebs and look out on this bold world more plainly. I am trying to become aware of the crazy-making stain of sharp edges that my Ghanaian boyfriend has to see past every time he tries to achieve anything at all. I am perceived as being well dressed without putting in any effort. I am addicted to my own comfort. And as I weigh my prospects I try to imagine how that effort spared in grooming and combing can best be spent.

  • East German joy

    Today I was in a tiny bakery in Brandenburg and laid a ten euro note on the counter. The bakery lady picked it up, her face spasming with disapproval, and shifted it 20cm south before dropping it in the special shallow plastic tray which is supposed to hold the money. Then she turned away to make me a cup of German tea: that is, boiled water with a tea bag sitting limply alongside. Then she picked up the ten euros again, took it and laid my change in the plastic tray.

    I said to the man queuing behind me whose hand was resting on a stack of newspapers, isn’t that a sad story? The full page story up front was printed on a black page – a cyclist in his seventies had been knocked from his bicycle by a car door and had died. This man shrugged. In astonishment I said, “Es ist Ihnen egal?” It’s all the same to you? He made a mouth. “Berliner Probleme.”

    These are just Berlin problems. We were an hour’s train ride from the city centre and standing on the platform of a Berlin train station. The train had ended early and we were all waiting for the official ‘replacement transport’, a big yellow bus. The bus driver looked me in the eye as I approached at the end of a small queue of people and then closed the glass doors in front of my face and drove off.

    I remembered suddenly that Berlin is an island, an island in the pleasureless wastes and Stasi prison camps of the former GDR. Eventually a new bus arrived, with a far friendlier driver, and only two other passengers, who befriended me and gave me careful, detailed instructions for my solo forest walk. As we drove through the little township I peered into people’s immaculate gardens, their kitschy window treatments and collections of tiny sculptures including various clothed animals and dolls made of clay or straw. Hours later the town’s only punk, who had given me directions to the town’s only affordable eatery which was not a snack bar selling mostly ice cream, stopped his matt black van beside me and said, “You must be tired of walking. Hop in.” His big caramel coloured hound loomed over the back seat and rested her head on my shoulder as we drove and he said, casually, “Yes. Hereabouts it’s pretty provincial. I came back because my Mother was ill.” We passed a beer garden crowded with big parties of bikers in their padded black jackets who had come out for the day while it’s still sunny. At the end of the street gleamed a beautiful lake. Shouts came from the sandy playground which had a large sign headed “Principles of Playground Conduct.” A swan stood among the ducks cleaning itself earnestly. I took a shot of rum in my hot chocolate and read my book, having lent the little boy next door in his pram my pen. A girl came out carrying a tray of unbelievably ornate ice cream towers in tall swirled glasses. She set out across the road in her perfect white sneakers. A large man came past toting a tiny bright eyed dog. The sun splashed the crumbling medieval town.

  • The Great Fire

    Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of life; turn her back on the War, which is, as we see, unending – ‘the inextinguishable conflagration’ – and write, at last, ‘Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.’

    Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death; of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration.

    These hours would be lived to the full. Years of hours would follow, but not this. He had felt their chance passing; she too, in fear. For this he had travelled to the airy, empty harbour where, like a legend, she lay in a mildewed swing-seat, waiting. As surely as if she had leapt from a planked deck into the ocean and swum ashore, she had jumped ship for him. Ten thousand miles had been retraced, down to the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name.

    Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.

    ~ Shirley Hazzard.

  • autumbled

    Autumn in Berlin and the grimy guy begging outside our supermarket is absorbed in a book. When I come home he’s set it down to thank a woman who dropped some coins into his smashed paper cup. It is Sylvia Plath.

    I prefer him to the punker dude who spreads himself with a large dog either side right in front of the sliding doors, then leans far across the pavement to make elaborate drawings in chalk which people then have to step around. His begging seems to me a form of veiled aggression. It is a set-up that forces compliance on every passerby, lest we tread on his art.

    The two months I was away I compared the daily forecasts and found Brisbane, in its winter, was invariably a degree or two warmer than here. Summer has been short and late. Just last week on the canalside two boys in the late sun were playing chess. These are the last days, and it will be so cold til June next year we will see nothing of each other but our faces.

  • angel Bowie

    Two hipsters compete in a Berlin bookshop, the day of David Bowie’s death

    Hipster One: I know, I mean I was like twelve when I heard ‘Changes’ for the first time.

    Hipster Two: I know, it’s like, I just… it’s like I had a personal connection. You know? Like I…

    Hipster One, abruptly: Yeah, everybody seems to be saying that.

    Hipster Two, hastily: I mean, not that I felt it, I mean like, this morning I was kind of like, Wow… But ~

    Hipster One: But now ~

    Hipster Two: I mean it hasn’t ruined my day or anything.

    I am standing in the window alcove with a volume I saw from the street and have lifted out of the display. This conversation, with its switches from having to care most to having to care least, seems to me exhausting. I think about the beautiful and dignified Iman, Bowie’s wife, whose day the news presumably has ruined. Hipster One, who owns the bookshop, calls across the room.

    Hipster One: Kann ich helfen?

    Me: O nein – danke, ich kann es selber lesen.

    Thank you, no… I can read it for myself. I smile at her lest she think I am being less playful than rude. I am reading a journal called Elsewhere, about place. It is a first volume, compiled by a bunch of homesick expatriates and published locally in English. To get here I walked past a stream of graffiti saying if you want to talk English, go to New York – Berlin hates you. Variations included Not for yuppies and the more melancholy anti-gentrification slogan Wir bleiben alle, written on a building which is about to be mass-evicted and made over for higher-paying expatriates. It occurs to me that Bowie himself was one of the pioneers of this gentrification.

    My companion, who made the signage for this shop, comes in and the shop owner realises belatedly why I look half-familiar. She switches from the formal Sie to the friendly du and cozies up, saying: Habt ihr einen guten Rutsch gehabt?

    And did you both have a good slip? a good slide? This is how Germans picture their entry into the New Year. After Christmas they start wishing each other einen guten Rutsch, as though all the nation held its breath ready to lurch down wildly careening into the new frontier, meatier, balder, bolder, breathlessly. We’ve arrived!

    I buy the journal. We walk on. My companion guides me round a brownish squelch coiled on the stones. I look closer. “That – is just a big fat brown hair scrunchie.” He laughs. “And yet…”

    I am pushing my bicycle, I don’t want to risk a bad slip, a bad slide. I tell him about the dog mess I found on my first visit to New York, wrapped in a flattened red singlet bag and shaped exactly like the drawing of a heart. I wrote about it online: I dog poo New York. On the river a circle of ice has formed round the perfect hole where someone threw a chair, a microwave, a bicycle, and the hole has frozen over. Bottles stand drunkenly frozen in place where they bobbed, and a few Christmas trees. Where the water has dissolved into liquid are a dozen ducks cosily chatting on the curving edge of remaining ice, which resembles a beach. It is so cold the tops of the buildings disappear but my breath makes shapes on the air. We are all smokers today. Or maybe, dragons. Breathing ice.

  • don’t you feel like reading books any more?

    I was in a bookshop yesterday with my friend just arrived from Copenhagen. It is around the corner from the bookshop where he and I first met. We met because he was standing gazing at the books in the English-speaking section when I visited to see how the ones I’d left were doing, and I went up to him and said, You should buy this one! I wrote it! And he did and then later I visited him at his own bookshop near the cold Danish lakes which has one wall of records and two walls of books and a tiny espresso machine.

    The bookshop yesterday has a cafe attached, it’s built under a railway line in a series of old-fashioned orange brick arches and you can hear trains screaming overhead while you drink your coffee. Adjacent to the cafe part are the shelves of books in two rooms, and the two sections of literature reach each other by means of a narrow passage, all too brief, papered entirely with the titles published by a German house which uses bold whole colours. So you walk into a rainbow of literature: I catch my breath. On the other side I peeled off to go visit poetry and my friend went visiting novels. The man who staffs the back section (English and French, philosophy, poetry) came sailing through from the just-closed cafe holding a small plate high on one hand. A fork stuck out of it, upright like a sail. Hard on his heels were two sad-eyed beagle-like dogs who weren’t beagles, who gathered themselves at his feet as he reached the stool and gazed imploringly at the underside of his plate. “Two very firm friends!” I remarked. “With clearly no agenda whatsoever.” “Tcha,” he said, spearing a wedge of cake. “Or maybe two very firm friends of the strawberry cake.”

    I began turning over the hardcover books, looking to see how people had solved the design problem I am wrestling with: how do you answer, on the back cover, the one powerful almost abstract image on the front? Do you just have a plain colour? If you put another photo, does it end up looking 90s, like a boulevard magazine? The combination, I find, of ambitious ideas of beauty with design inexperience makes independent publishing hard. My friend showed me a novel marked The greatest book you’ve never read. Neither of us had read it, either. He was looking for WG Sebald. “Have you read Proust?” “Oh, yes. But I can’t remember any of it. It took me months.”

    As he turned away I remembered what my novelist friend had said, at the time: You should put that on your gravestone. “She read Proust.” The man on the stool dropped two chunks of cake for his patient friends. I thought how the poetry section was in the dimmest corner but a good slice of strawberry cake brings dogs to your heels. I turned back to the hardcovers, none the wiser, nonetheless. Another book lover walked in, an older man in a beautiful wool coat. One of the dogs had climbed into the leather armchair at the entrance to my rainbow and was sitting there looking rather tired and sad. “Na?” he said, stooping to greet her. ‘Na’ is hard to translate but means, I think, approximately: so? how are you, person whom I feel attached to and fond of, or whom I like on sight. The dog gazed back at him plaintively. Clearly he had brought no strawberry cake. He tickled her under her chin. “Und?” he asked her. “Hast du keine Lust mehr, Bücher zu lesen?” Don’t you feel like reading books anymore? How Germans speak to dogs – courteously, seriously, with familiarity – makes me truly love them.

    You’ll see some raddled punker and some lady in expensive trainers, their two dogs tangle in a sniffing wreath along the river path and they both stand there smiling tolerantly, as if to say: Tcha…. That’s just the way dogs are. I had seen this that same morning, in a seamier part of town. In other news, we saw an otter swimming along the canal, and followed it for half a mile under the trees. Periodically it dived, making a ring of bright water and then emerging further along up the bank. Turns out otters swim at about a walking pace. In all my life I’ve never seen one before, I’d have taken it for a beaver except that I asked a man standing with his arms folded and he told me, doubtlessly, “That – is an otter.” Another man in his blue kayak was sorting things on the bank, readying himself for a sunny day’s rowing. On the other side two trumpeters stood side by side and played some mournful tune into the quiet water’s ears.

  • the great book explosion of 2015

    Imagine we were all living in a world where almost everyone was carrying a book in their pocket. And was intently engaged in its consumption. And pulled it out of their pocket to read more at every interval and sometimes stood stock still in the middle of the grocery aisle because they had become so lost in reading their great book.

  • desperate for literature

    At ten o’clock at night I went out walking round the curve of the road under bright green trees lit from the lamps, everything beautiful, hot and radiant. A bookshop was open, or so I thought. When I pushed on the door two guys came running out from the rush-bottomed chairs where they’d been chatting. “Oh, sorry,” I said, “you look as if you’ve just closed, actually.” “No, no, come in, come in.” The books were in English down one wall and Spanish on the other, stacked on shelves which started out polished and neat and then wound up built from raw old wood and bricks. A beautiful woman came out from some back room and told me, “The books up the back are just as good as the books up the front here, keep looking.” They sat down and continued their chat. “What was the name of the girl in To Kill a Mockingbird? Cass?” “Was it Cass?”

    I said, “I know people in Hollywood have named babies after her, so if we could just think of the right baby…” “Scout!” said the man with the beard who had Google in his hand. We talked for a moment about the new novel and how there is some concern Harper Lee may have been… persuaded into finally publishing it. “It’s about Scout’s life as an adult,” said the other guy, an American. A small crowd of people came in at the narrow front door. One said, I think, this reminded him of Shakespeare and Co in Paris, and the English man said pointing to his partner, whose name was Charlotte, “That’s where we worked! Up until three days ago!” Two hours earlier he and Charlotte had taken over this tiny store, which is called Desperate Literature, from their American friend, whose name is Cory. “So we’ve met!” said Charlotte, a gorgeous woman who acts as though being beautiful gives her no special status. The little man who had mentioned Shakespeare and Co gave a cry. “We’ve met! So you’ve patted my book!” “I’ve patted your book!” she said. “Wait – what book was it.” Without hesitation he named the book everybody buys when they visit Shakespeare and Co in Paris. “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.” “That was you!” she cried. I was out the back laughing. The timing was so wonderful, the sense of willing group improvisation that is true conversation, as at the loveliest dinner parties. Charlotte was jubilant that they’d sold a copy of Wisława Szymborska (to me) on their first night and her partner Terry introduced himself and told me, as he had told the Paris customers, “We are having a big party here on Thursday night, come by.” He looked around the tiny, crowded rooms. “Well – a little party.”

     

  • writing hardily

    Today I was writing in a cafe and when I pulled out my laptop to transcribe out of a messy notebook the woman next to me got up and slid between our tables, saying something over her shoulder under her breath. “I’ve just come from the office…” I was wondering why she would feel so insecure that she would need to explain her movements to a stranger when it sank in – as she sank in, to the bench seat opposite – what it was that she had said: “Ich komme gerade vom Büro, I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” The funny thing was she was clutching her mobile phone like it was a huge reefer she was about to lift on the ball of the hand to her lips, and the flickering of her screen had caught my eye and momentarily bothered me, before I caught myself and realised how insane it was to resent someone for poring over their screen while I pored over mine. She was staring at me across the room, I raised my shoulders and spread my hands. “Was, denn?” She called the waitress over and repeated her complaint in the exact same words: “I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” Around the flower arrangement she pointed me out. The waitress shrugged helplessly, her face relapsing from an attempt at sympathy into a foolish smirk. What could she say? I let go the sward of ideas I had built in the air as they demolished themselves and dissolved in the face of such tiny, such concerted ill-will, and took out my notebook again and tried to let my gaze fall into the precise point of the middle distance where happiness and contemplation and, it sometimes seems, poetry lie thick on the chilly air like leaves on the ice. I told myself this place – a “literary cafe” attached to a bookshop – would not exist if not for writers like me and took up my pen again and foraged on.

  • grappapa

    I found a bar lit solely by candles. To get there I had to pass twenty-five Christmas trees, laid out to die on the stones. A wax-stick notice scribbled in the window of a nearby cafe said, Be at least epic. I found a bar I liked and it took me two passes to work up the courage to go in. The barman was Spanish and wearing a beautiful waistcoat. He brought me a clean glass of water, a fresh white napkin, a glass bowl of pretzels, and an ashtray. He folded his hands and said, Was darf’s sein?

    I said, I’ve had a fight with my boyfriend and we’re living in one room, I’ve got nowhere to go so I came here. No, actually, I said: have you got some kind of grappa, or something? Sure, he said, and poured me a large measure. He swung the bottle between his middlemost fingers, to show me it now rung empty. “That would be it,” he said. Some more Spanish guys came in and the world was lost in embracing. I saw them pull out their tobacco pouches and grabbed my drink and took it right up the back. Couches. Little spindly tables. Candles.

    There was a note written on a napkin framed on the wall. I translated it for myself. Dear Sebastian. Once again we have to find ourselves another bar. This sucks. This is the 85th time! Please let us know when you are opening once more. Next to it a sampler stitched in cursive said, Liquor. I got out my notebook and started to analyse. Last night was his fault, and he’s apologized. This one was probably more to do with me. I guess I overreacted. We neither of us do well with sharing the one room: us and the dog. Two individualists sharing four walls. Baby, I was born to run.

    Last night a quarrel blew up over dinner, a civilized affair involving a bottle of red wine from Spain I’d fetched and some luscious spaghetti he had made. I couldn’t stand it, simply just couldn’t stand it. “What is the matter with you?” I asked him. He went out to drink a beer with his friend, a darling man whose snarling cat has just died. I mean, just in the last week. “Tell him from me I’m sorry, very sorry about the little one. Don’t let anyone tell him it’s only a cat, or he should get another one. Love hurts.” “Ok, I’ll tell him.” When he got back I had just finished my book – Robinson Crusoe – and was disposed to complain. “It starts out so adventuresome then it ends in a ten-page account of his tax debts and financial affairs. Ducat by ducat.” He said, “Didn’t anything exciting happen?” “O yes,” I said, shrugging, “I suppose – he and 12 other people got set upon by 300 wolves in the Pyrenees. But it somehow made dry reading.” He sat down beside me and stroked my hair. I said, “I can’t believe he went into all that detail about his monetary decisions and didn’t mention one word about how it felt when he left his island, where he had lived alone for almost 28 years!” He swung his long legs up beside me and opened his own book with one elegant finger. “I wish I could read you some of this,” he said. “But I think you’ve already read it.” I lay my book on his chest so that it slid into his lap. “Read me some of this,” I said, wheedlingly. I felt so baffled by Berlin. I felt homesick but hardly knew for where. The point of the city began only gradually to seep back into me as I strolled this late evening, my fury settling, looking in the windows of bars. I felt transplanted, my roots snapped and shrivelled. That tiny village of a few hundred souls where we had made our home – unexpectedly, unplanned, sleepily – since just before Christmas was gone. I needed to be held.

    So he took up the book I had offered, a novel from Mills and Boon. Gravely he read me the title and author and all of the details on the inside sleeve page. “Towards the Dawn, by Jane Arbor. First published 1956. This edition 1969.” I curled into his belly and listened there to the secondary rumble of his voice. The soft hesitancy of his European accent that executes perfectly the French towns and train stations and hesitates over words like “battleaxe” (pronounced “battle eggs”). A few pages in the girl alights at an unknown French provincial station. It is late and dark, the station sign almost seems to swing overhead. We had ourselves just recently alighted from a long European rail journey, all the way back to Berlin through the night from his family to our tiny apartment. As she looks blankly round the empty platform, a shadow looms. “‘Mademoiselle finds herself in difficulties?’ he asked.” He stopped reading and we both indulged a romantic shiver. “He….!” he said, just as I said, “He!” I confided, “I can tell you how to tell if this is the hero. If he’s charming and frank with her, he is just an obstacle the hero will remove. But if he is grumpy and has no patience with her, if they strike sparks off one another… that means he’s definitely the one.” “I see,” he said, nodding as if wisely, taking up the little book and slicking back its page. I coiled into the doona and listened and he picked his way over the words written long, long, long before my parents were courting. Another world. Reminder of the true world we’re in. The book has yellowed stiff pages and its cover is printed dark pink. I took up one of my heavy bedtime plaits and dropped it over my eye so that the bed light wouldn’t disturb me. I started falling asleep. As I fell I remembered another gentle man I had loved in the past who once when I could not sleep at all drew barely a sigh when I woke him for the dozenth time, saying patiently, “Alright listen. I’ll roll over and you cling onto me and off we’ll go into sleep together. You ready? Hold on tight! You hangin’ on?”